Re: [Savannah-users] Yet another gpl license question

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:23:30 -0800 (PST), Joseph Pesco
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Yes, my project is all scripts.  You are correct I should first
> attempt to pole the system on installation for required capabilities
> (rpm jargon), before taking matters into my own hands.

How will you do that if these install steps are running on
an x86 build farm, but the target system is an embedded
ARM system? 

In that situation, the programs you need are not in
/bin or /usr/bin (or worse, they are there, but they are the
build machine's installation of the programs, not those
of the target system!)

It's better just to document what your dependencies are,
and trust that the package maintainers can figure out
the rest.

Provide a helpful run-time check, perhaps like this:

  the-most-important-script --check-prerequisites

The check should either terminate successfully and
print nothing, or else fail and print a list of the
missing programs needed by the entire script suite.

The package maintainers then have single, one-liner
test case to check that the dependencies are actually
satisfied in the generated system image.