A new AI dependency for Calibre (optional for Firefox)

General system Applications
1

Got hit with a prompt to pick one of these “options” to install an AI tool (from Microsoft, no less) when updating today:

onnxruntime-cpu
onnxruntime-cuda
onnxruntime-opt-cuda
onnxruntime-opt-rocm
onnxruntime-rocm

Considering that the package’s main website has a top-level name of “ai” (https://onnxruntime.ai/), I could not get rid of Calibre fast enough. I hope for those Firefox users that this does not become a hard dependency.

2

It is used for the “read aloud” feature.

It is optional from calibre’s perspective but the Arch package is built with support for it, hence the dependency.

If you don’t want that on your system you could easily build calibre without it.

3

OK, that’s good to know. I really don’t use it much anymore; getting most of my reads from Libby now.