#89 Metamorphose v2 no longer works on most operating systems.

[J. Reis]

Metamorphose v2 no longer works on most operating systems, crashing at launch time due to (I believe) an outdated dependency which is not easily satisfied on any reasonably modern system.

There's a couple of tickets (here, here & here) open that I suspect all relate the the same basic issue.

My system (Debian Stable) provides python-wxgtk3.0. and while the metamorphose deb specifies ">=2.8" metamorphose will not install from the deb package claiming that
Dependency is not satisfiable: python-wxgtk2.8 (>= 2.8)

I made some attempts to modifiy the deb (unpack with ar, edit control, repack) to specify 3.0 in the hopes that the newer library might be backwards compatible enough to work if I could convince metamorphose to install. Unfortunately the new deb failed with:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package metamorphose2.deb
E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'metamorphose2.deb'
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'metamorphose2.deb'

Whether that was due to my incompetence editing the deb or not I'm not sure.

From source tar … 'make all' appears to succeed. but entering 'metamorphose2' in terminal prints:
("\nwxPython 2.8 is required!\nRefer to 'readme_xx.html'", ' for installation instructions.\n')

So, we need wxPython 2.8 …

I'm at the limit of my technical comeptence here, so bear with me. I don't know anything about cross-compiling or seting up build environments, but I don't think that would help anyway since the dependecy asked for by the binary package and not the compiler. So it is expected that the base system will provide wxPython to the executable. I think that means nothing I do at build time would matter … in fact I'm not sure metamotphose2 gets compiled at all, it may just run through the python interpreter. I know nothing!

But, either way, I believe this can be resolved (on Linux) by taking the deb (or if neccessary the src) and packaging it along with its dependencies as an AppImage. The 2.8 version of wxPython is available here.

So, I've got some reading & learning to do before I know enough about making AppImages to give this a try. Probably a good learning experience for me, but given my relative degree of "smartness" with this stuff it might take awhile. So if anyone more competent wanted to step in I wouldn't object in the slightest.

Justin R.