Re: ANN: PikoPixel pixel-art editor

[Josh Freeman]

Hi David,

On Sep 19, 2015, at 7:10 AM, David Chisnall wrote:

> 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.

   Thank you very much for setting this up! Hope it runs OK on FreeBSD.


>  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)

   Thanks for the helpful tips - I'll take these into account when  
preparing the next release. I'll likely also have some questions for  
you about packaging the program.


> David


Cheers,

Josh





> > 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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> > Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
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>
>
>
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