1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

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1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby wolgade » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:44 pm

Well, this is a very brief look at the Ubuntu package provided by the PPA.

http://www.makehumancommunity.org/wiki/Releases:120a1

What I did:
  1. Did a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 just for testing.
  2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makehuman-official/makehuman-community
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install makehuman-community
  3. Tried to act as if I was completely new to this fancy 3D stuff.

First thing I noticed was that MH now depends on Blender. Why? MH is a standalone application. It doesn't need any Blender stuff. Even worse, this dependency forces users to install the Blender version provided by Ubuntu/Debian. This is not the best option. A few years back Blender from Ubuntu/Debian lacked FBX support. Maintainers simply switched it off. This can happen to anything that is not considered open and free enough by the Debian folks.

Blender provided by Ubuntu 18.04 has FBX support, but lacks GPU (Nvidia/CUDA) support. Well, here we go. Blender from blender.org works out of the box with my GTX 1070. After some research (https://askubuntu.com/questions/1032669 ... in-blender) I found a way to add GPU-Support by installing cuda-toolkit. This way the CUDA stuff gets compiled on your first render (takes a while).

I'd strongly recommend to remove Blender as a dependency unless you want to deal with Blender problems caused by Ubuntu/Debian in our forum.

Ok, let's start MH. Makehuman-community-bodyparts was installed as a depency. Description says: "These are all the official body parts available for this version of MakeHuman. Body parts include things such as teeth, genitalia, eyes etc." Well, there are no genitals nor genital-proxies. No, I don't think we have to ship them with the standard distribution, but then we shouldn't claim to do so.

Let's go to the asset downloader. As this is a fresh install syncing might take a while. Indeed, it does. After 20 minutes MH simply froze. "killall python3" solved the problem, but it's not the best way to terminate a program. Unfortunately there's no log entry indicating the problem. After a restart of MH asset downloader claims that syncing is complete. I didn't check whether this is true.

We really have to rethink the downloader. Initial sync takes ages and transfers hugh amounts of data. This wasn't a problem when we had a very limited number of assets, but now?

As a next step I wanted to create some simple test clothes in Blender. This requires MakeClothes. Installing makehuman-community-blendertools does the job. That's good.

And now that I finished modelling I can export using MHX2, but wait a second! I can export, but where is the importer? makehuman-community-blendertools only provided MakeClothes and MakeTarget. Noobish as I am, I'm stuck now. I will search the web and install some old MHX stuff I might find somewhere. Then I'll join the forum and complain that it doesn't work. :)
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby Aranuvir » Mon Nov 26, 2018 10:46 pm

Thank you for the long and detailed test of the recent build of MakeHuman. I'm a bit surprised MH is still running on 12.04. Are you paying for ultra long term support?
I agree that Blender should only be suggested as a recommendation during installation, though I'd hear Joel's opinion, probably it's a problem with the blender tools provided by the ppa. We are aware of some problems with the asset downloader, which uses QThread, that seems to act a bit unstable, causing even app crashes. And the connection to tuxfamily is very slow. I had to wait an hour. We are working as much and hard as we can to get those problems fixed...
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby wolgade » Tue Nov 27, 2018 12:02 am

Aranuvir wrote:I'm a bit surprised MH is still running on 12.04. Are you paying for ultra long term support?

Ooops! I'm talking about 18.04 LTS, of course. I should have had a look at the calender. 2018? Really?
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby wolgade » Tue Nov 27, 2018 12:10 am

Aranuvir wrote:I agree that Blender should only be suggested as a recommendation during installation, though I'd hear Joel's opinion, probably it's a problem with the blender tools provided by the ppa.

Blender tools aren't installed when you install MH. You have to install them seperately. That's what I did. Having a depency on Blender when installing Blender tools makes sense. It doesn't make any sense to have a Blender dependency when installing MH without Blender tools.
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby joepal » Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:50 am

As a general background, debian has three levels of dependencies:

  • "Depends" - required dependency, will always be installed. An error will arise if the dependency cannot be installed.
  • "Recommends" - optional dependency, which is strongly indicated. Systems such as ubuntu will install these per default unless you untick a checkbox or run apt-get with "--no-install-recommends"
  • "Suggests" - optional dependency, which is weakly indicated. These won't be installed per default. You'll have to explicitly ask for them.
The MakeHuman control file where dependencies are defined is here: https://github.com/makehumancommunity/m ... an/control

As you can see, the strongest dependency on blender here is "Recommends" in blendertools. Blendertools in its turn is only "Suggests" by makehuman.

After further debugging, it would seem that it isn't makehuman that pulls in blender. Instead, it's one of the plugins that has a "Recommends" for blender, which is probably too strong.

For the other comments, I agree with the majority of them:

  • The package descriptions for the PPA is simply copy/pasted from a stone age version and should be reviewed
  • The asset database is too large to require the users to download all the screenshots for all the assets. It is the screenshots that causes the largest part of the sync data. It would probably be acceptable to still download all thumbnails.
  • We shouldn't recommend users to use ubuntu's blender. On the contrary, we should strongly warn against it, not only for CUDA. I have quite painfully been made aware that not all python addons are runnable in ubuntu's version of blender: https://github.com/makehumancommunity/m ... /issues/36

For the MHX2 blender side, I'm doubtful if it's viable to a) offer it via PPA but b) not have it depend on ubuntu's blender. You can't install PPA stuff to the user home, so the addon has to end up somewhere in the general system. And the only sensible option is in the plugin dir where ubuntu's blender fetches addons. The same goes for the blender side of the socket importer.
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http://www.palmius.com/joel
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby wolgade » Tue Nov 27, 2018 9:11 pm

joepal wrote:As a general background, debian has three levels of dependencies:

Thanks for explaining. The funny thing: If you use a tool like synaptic, as I often do, you'll never see these levels and you'll never notice soft recommendations.
joepal wrote:it would seem that it isn't makehuman that pulls in blender. Instead, it's one of the plugins that has a "Recommends" for blender, which is probably too strong.

Definitely. Do we "recommend" using Blender from Ubuntu? No, we don't.
joepal wrote:As you can see, the strongest dependency on blender here is "Recommends" in blendertools.

blendertools doesn't make much sense without Blender being installed in a standard way. In this case "Depends" would be ok. As MH doesn't depend on blendertools, there's no problem.

What I have in mind:

MH without blendertools doesn't need any dependency on Blender. Packages are provided in a way that Blender is not installed automatically (to be changed). Blendertools won't get installed when you install MH (already the case).

Blendertools are provided for convenience. They don't make sense without a dependency on Blender as they rely on locations where Ubuntu-Blender looks for plugins and addons. Blendertools actually provide MC and MT. Additionaly they should provide MHX2 importer, MakeWalk and your sync plugin.
Plugims provided by blendertools are additionally offered as zip files to be installed the Blender way.

Why this approach?

Experiended Blender users can install MH in a convenient way without being forced to install a Blender flavour they don't like. They know how to install addons.
New users with no Blender experience install MH and blendertools and are ready to get started. It's unlikely that they run into limitations while doing their first steps.

joepal wrote:The asset database is too large to require the users to download all the screenshots for all the assets. It is the screenshots that causes the largest part of the sync data. It would probably be acceptable to still download all thumbnails.

This is not specific to the PPA. I mentioned it as I tried to act as a new user. Yes, the amount of data transferred is way too large. Things will get worse when the number of assets grows. They will also get worse with an increased number of new users.
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby loki1950 » Mon Dec 31, 2018 8:14 pm

Just installed via the ppa on my new laptop on a fresh Mint 19 install the community tab and mhx2 are not included and tried the new plug-in installer and it did not work either the v1py3 plug-in folder is read but the activation fails I will post the relevant log details later(editing out the none useful lines ;) The laptop has a Radeon R7 GPU though I am using the normal X.org driver no issues with OpenGL.

EDIT: forgot to download mhapi DOH with that the community tab does work just have to wait for a connection.

Enjoy the Choice :)
my box::HP Envy i5-6400 @2Q70GHzx4 8 Gb ram/1 Tb(Win10 64)/3 Tb Mint 19.2/GTX745 4Gb acer S243HL K222HQL
Q8200/Asus P5QDLX/8 Gb ram/WD 2Tb 2-500 G HD/GF GT640 2Gb Mint 17.3 64 bit Win 10 32 bit acer and Lenovo Ideapad 320-15ABR Win 10/Mint 19
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby joepal » Tue Jan 01, 2019 12:32 pm

Mint seems to not install "recommends" per default, meaning you have to manually and specifically install everything. On ubuntu, all dependencies which are "recommends" will be installed automatically.
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Re: 1.2.0 alpha1 Ubuntu PPA

Postby loki1950 » Tue Jan 01, 2019 1:14 pm

Thanx for the reminder joel Mint has indeed adopted that policy part of there lets keep the install stable priority there Update Manager's levels are part of this as well.

Enjoy the Choice :)
my box::HP Envy i5-6400 @2Q70GHzx4 8 Gb ram/1 Tb(Win10 64)/3 Tb Mint 19.2/GTX745 4Gb acer S243HL K222HQL
Q8200/Asus P5QDLX/8 Gb ram/WD 2Tb 2-500 G HD/GF GT640 2Gb Mint 17.3 64 bit Win 10 32 bit acer and Lenovo Ideapad 320-15ABR Win 10/Mint 19
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