Re: A rosetta stone of package names?

[Tim Post]

Hi Richard,

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 15:07 +0100, Richard Ash wrote:
> > Such a look up table would be priceless, I think :) I have had zero luck
> > in finding one.
> 
> A compiled table would be large, cumbersome and perennially out of date.
> What you could do would be to associate each library with it's home page
> relatively easily (in 99% of cases. A few are orphaned etc, but most
> have a home on the web somewhere).
> Armed with that you should be able to search the host distribution's
> package databases to locate the available packages.

I am working on using Autoconf as a universal installer for GNUPanel, a
free web hosting control panel.

We have very little code that actually has to be compiled, however we
depend on several dozen packages that must come from the distribution.
As we evolve, we'll surely depend on more.

Rather than maintain a version for each distribution, I hope to just
write macros that output pre-installation scripts.

This is proving to be much more 'interesting' than it should be :) For
instance, obtaining PHP and modules.

> This is the process
> I would go through manually if faced with a configure script error, and
> it isn't usually hard (assuming your distribution actually has a
> sensible package database system) to find what you want. How to get it
> is a much bigger problem, given the poor availability of packages for
> many distributions.

Correct, and subtle differences in the packages between distributions
leads to subtle breakage. I started writing scripts to account for this
and they became so ugly that I deleted them.

Teaching some macros how to get it right 99% of the time still seems
favorable to maintaining our own version of everything that we depend on
and managing updates .. we would much rather rely on the packaging
mechanism to do that.

If I come up with something useful or interesting I'll send it along.

Regards,
--Tim

-- 
Monkey + Typewriter = Echoreply ( http://echoreply.us )