gnustep-dev
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Re: Changes I've been thinking of...
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 2009 14:52:39 +0100


On 8 Oct 2009, at 13:38, David Chisnall wrote:

On 8 Oct 2009, at 13:30, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

it's up to the packaging systems used by the distribution how they do things, the task is much the same as with any other software, not a GNUstep specific issue, and it's really not our concern how packagers for different distributions do things.


I think this reinforces my original point. GNUstep, at the moment, is not friendly towards packagers.

???
So in what way is it unfriendly to packagers, and how do we improve it?

FreeBSD is about the only platform that has well-maintained up-to- date GNUstep packages (and, here, I include stuff built on top of GNUstep), although a few Linux distros have recently started updating their old GNUstep packages, so that may change soon.

It is not our concern how packagers choose to distribute things, but it should be our concern to make things easy for packagers. Currently, it is not, and the result is that people interested in developing with GNUstep find that they have no recent GNUstep package for their distribution of choice and then give up.

You are right that this is not a GNUstep-specific issue. It is an issue that all software faces and successful projects tend to be the ones that make life easy for packagers.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good GNUstep is if it's too much effort for people to install, because they simply won't ever try it.

True in principle of course but ...

As I recall,

1. we have Adam's work on packaging for ms-windows which makes it easy to install stuff there.
2. we have support for .rpm packaging built into gnustep-make
3. we have considered putting support for .deb packaging into gnustep- make but apparently it's debian policy to specifically NOT want automated packaging, and to want packages built by hand.

That probably covers the popular packaging forms. I'm still not happy about (3) ... (even if they want hand-built packaged, I'd have thought that having automatically built ones as a starting point would be useful), but it's hard to argue with the packagers themselves.

It looks to me like GNUstep is actually much more friendly to packagers than most projects are, and it's certainly not less friendly to packagers than most... but of course we still need ideas on how to improve.






reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]