Re: ANN: PikoPixel pixel-art editor

[David Chisnall]

Hi Josh,

Thank you for taking the time to make this work with GNUstep and for the open 
source release.

I’ve added it to the FreeBSD ports collection, it should appear as a binary 
package in the next couple of days.  A few things that you could do to make 
life easier for people packaging it (also for reference for other developers):

- .zip files are slightly annoying to deal with - .tar.gz or .xz are better

- Having version numbers that are not monotonic means that we need some special 
handling (i.e. 1.0 will be after 1.0b5 - it’s easier if you make beta versions 
a lower number, e.g. 0.9.5)

- Putting the version number in the download file name (along with the point 
above) means that we will automatically detect updates when they appear for 
download and packaging a new revision is about 30 seconds of work.

- Packages usually require a paragraph of text describing them (along with a 
one-line short summary).  I’ve tried to turn your list of bullets into a 
sentence, but having something that can be copied and pasted makes things 
easier.

- Not being able to build from the top-level is slightly annoying, and 
something that I could have noted before the first testbuild if it had been 
possible to browse the source online.

More generally, only having source available as a tarball (no public revision 
control system, even read only) makes it hard for people to contribute.

For other people, a few things that were good:

- A single archive for the release.  For projects hosted on GitHub, this is 
free and we can ship pre-release versions easily with the auto-generated 
tarballs.  Projects that are not hosted on something like GitHub and don’t do 
regular release tarballs are annoying to package.

- Archive extracts into a directory with the same name as the archive (yes, 
some people still get this wrong!)

- License is clearly specified and license file at top level of project.

- Well-specified set of dependencies (would be nice to have this on the web 
page as well as the email)

David

> On 18 Sep 2015, at 20:57, Josh Freeman <gnustep_lists@twilightedge.com> wrote:
> 
>   PikoPixel is a free Mac OS X pixel-art editor that's currently in beta for 
> its initial 1.0 release.
> 
>   The latest beta version, 1.0 BETA5, is the first source-code release (AGPL 
> v3), and the first version that also runs on GNUstep.
> 
>   PikoPixel GNUstep binaries aren't available yet (haven't gotten around to 
> figuring out GS standalone application packaging), so for the moment, 
> PikoPixel must be built from source.
> 
>   Requirements for compiling PikoPixel are a recent version of the GNUstep 
> development environment (June 2015 or later) and the libobjc2 runtime. Also, 
> PP's only been tested so far under Clang, and on Debian-based Linux distros 
> (Ubuntu & Mint), so there may be issues with other configurations.
> 
>   PikoPixel's source code archive is linked at the bottom of the webpage (not 
> the green "Download" arrow, which downloads the Mac-only binary):
> http://twilightedge.com/mac/pikopixel/
> 
>   Please send questions, comments, or issues to pikopixel (at) twilightedge 
> (dot) com.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Josh Freeman
> Twilight Edge Software
> http://twilightedge.com
> 
> 
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