It took me quite a while to release a new package for Calibre, the e-book library manager. That had a reason.
In July I switched the Qt5 package in my repositories to version 5.11 to support the latest KDE Plasma5 software and because it offers advantages over the previous 5.9 releases. Unfortunately, as I found out soon afterwards, the Calibre software fails to work with Qt 5.11 – its GUI components were not built and there was no obvious error to explain why.
Therefore I had to re-visit the calibre.SlackBuild‘s internals and try to revive the internal functions that compile an embedded Qt library set. This was last tested in the early days of my Calibre packages when Qt4 was the running champion. Adding internal Qt5 support was quite a different beast. Qt5 is a lot bigger than the venerable Qt4 so the build process needed some pruning to keep the compilation times acceptable and the package size under control.
That took a full week’s nights of compiling, debugging, recompiling and so on… hence the lack of updates on the ‘ktown’ front where I should perhaps pay some attention to a recent poppler update in slackware-current. But I managed to add Qt 5.9 internal library support to the calibre package.
My package for Slackware 14.2 still depends on an external ‘qt5’ package (to keep the package size small and because calibre works just fine with the qt 5.7 which is available from my own repository and the SBo script repository). The package for Slackware -current on the other hand was built with an embedded Qt 5.9, which means that its external dependency list shrunk to just ‘podofo’ and ‘unrar’.
Grab the new ‘calibre’ package and enjoy your e-book library!
A repetition of events… just like in July, an update in Slackware-current broke lots of 3rd party stuff. This time it was the 
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