Storeman Installer

The Storeman Installer for SailfishOS performs the initial installation of the Storeman OpenRepos client application. Storeman Installer selects, downloads and installs the correct variant of the Storeman application built for the CPU-architecture of the device and the installed SailfishOS release from the SailfishOS-OBS.

Background

Starting with version 0.2.9, Storeman is built by the help of the SailfishOS-OBS and initially installed by the Storeman Installer (or manually). To update from Storeman < 0.2.9 (requires SailfishOS ≥ 3.1.0), one should reinstall Storeman via the Storeman Installer. After an initial installation of Storeman ≥ 0.3.0, further updates of Storeman will be performed within Storeman, as usual.

The Storeman Installer works on any SailfishOS release ≥ 3.1.0 and all three supported CPU-architectures (aarch64, armv7hl and i486). The current Storeman Installer RPM can be obtained from its "latest release" page at GitHub and OpenRepos.net.

RPMs of older Storeman releases are also available at OpenRepos, e.g. v0.1.8 which works on SailfishOS 2.2.1 and may work on older SailfishOS 2 releases.

Important notes

• If you experience issues with Storeman Installer, please take a look at its log file /var/log/harbour-storeman-installer.log.txt. If that does not reveal to you what is going wrong, please check first if an issue report describing this issue is already filed at GitHub, then you might file a new issue report there and attach the log file to it, or enhance an extant bug report.
• If you experience issues when installing, removing or updating packages after a SailfishOS upgrade, try running devel-su pkcon refresh in a terminal app.
• When Storeman Installer fails to install anything (i.e. a minute after installing it the icon of Storeman has not appeared on the launcher / desktop), most likely the preceding or the following bullet point is the reason.
• Before software can be build for a SailfishOS release at the SailfishOS-OBS, Jolla must create a corresponding "download on demand (DoD)" OBS-repository. It may take a little time after a new SailfishOS release is published before the corresponding "DoD" repository is being made available, during which installing Storeman by the Storeman Installer or updating Storeman by itself on a device with the new SailfishOS release already installed does not work, because Storeman cannot be compiled for this new SailfishOS release at the Sailfish-OBS, yet; consequently this is always the case for "closed beta (cBeta)" releases of SailfishOS. In such a situation one has to manually download Storeman built for the last prior SailfishOS "general availability (GA)" release (e.g. from its releases section at GitHub or the SailfishOS-OBS), then install or update Storeman via pkcon install-local <downloaded RPM file>, and hope that there is no change in the new SailfishOS release which breaks Storeman; if there is, please report that soon at Storeman's issue tracker.
• Disclaimer: Storeman and its installer may still have flaws, kill your kittens or break your SailfishOS installation! Although this is very unlikely after years of testing by many users, new flaws may be introduced in any release (as for any software). Mind that the license you implicitly accept by using Storeman or Storeman Installer excludes any liability.

Installation instructions

• Initial installation without having Storeman already installed

  1. Enable "System → Security → Untrusted software → Allow untrusted software" in the SailfishOS Settings app.
  2. Download the current Storeman Installer RPM from its "latest release" page at GitHub or OpenRepos.net.
  3. Tap on the "File downloaded" notification on your SailfishOS device or select the downloaded RPM file in a file-manager app and choose "Install" in its pulley menu; then confirm the installation.
  4. Preferably disable "Allow untrusted software" again.

• Installation via Storeman (i.e. updating from Storeman < 0.2.9)

  • ^{If you have olf's repository at OpenRepos enabled, Storeman Installer should be offered as an update candidate for the outdated Storeman installed: Just accept this offer.
    Otherwise:}
  1. Search for Installer.
  2. Select the Storeman Installer by olf.
  3. Enable olf's repository in the top pulley menu.
  4. Install Storeman Installer.

Features of Storeman Installer

• The Storeman Installer is automatically removed ("uninstalled") when Storeman is being installed.
• Storeman Installer 1.3.1 and all later versions are offered as an update candidate for Storeman, if an RPM repository is enabled, which offers the harbour-storeman-installer package and Storeman (harbour-storeman package) < 0.2.99 is already installed.
• Installing Storeman Installer 1.3.1 and all later versions also automatically removes an installed Storeman (harbour-storeman package) < 0.2.99, which eliminates the former necessity to manually remove ("uninstall") an old Storeman.
• Storeman Installer 1.3.8 and all later versions create a persistent log file /var/log/harbour-storeman-installer.log.txt.
• Storeman Installer 2 runs "unattended": I.e. without any manual steps, after its installation has been triggered, until Storeman is installed.
• Storeman Installer is slow, because it calls pkcon two (releases before v1.3.8) to three times (releases from v1.3.8 on), which acts quite slowly. The minimal run time for Storeman Installer 2 is about 7 seconds, the typical run time is rather 10 seconds (measured from the moment Storeman Installer's installation is triggered, until Storeman is installed and its icon is displayed at the "launcher"). This is already a lot, but rarely the Packagekit daemon stalled (packagekitd, for which pkcon is just a command line front-end, communicating with the daemon via D-Bus) during heavy testing, which can be observed with the crude pkmon utility (Ctrl-C gets you out. 😃), so the Storeman Installer now tries to detect these "hangs" and to counter them: If that happens, its run time can be up to slightly more than 1 minute. In the worst case a stalled PackageKit daemon (and with it its pkcon client process(es)) stalls Storeman Installer, until the PackageKit daemon reaches its idle time out of 300 seconds (5 minutes; this could theoretically happen three times, resulting in a likely unsuccessful run time of more than 15 minutes).
  Also note that SailfishOS sometimes fails to show an icon of a freshly installed app on the launcher ("homescreen") until SailfishOS is rebooted (rsp. more precisely: Lipstick is restarted).