On Sun, 14 Jan 2018 18:01:39 +0100, Pascal Obry wrote: >> Despite of that what are the competencies needed to compile for mac? >> It is not quite clear to me how technical you have to be to >> contribute. > > Can't tell, I'm not a MacOS user. That's certainly not trivial. But > maybe you have photograph and computer scientist people around you, > talk about darktable and the need for the implication to make things > moving. There is lot of way to contribute.
Porting the code is not likely to be the major problem if it's not trying to be clever about taking advantage of the latest and greatest. Packaging is the issue (speaking as the Gutenprint project lead). The main issue is how packaging is done on Linux vs. MacOS. On Linux, packaging is seen as the responsibility of the distribution, while on MacOS (and any Apple OS) it's the responsibility of the project to package its own releases. So despite the greater diversity of packaging systems on Linux and traditional UNIX (RPM, Debian, ipkg on Solaris, and such), this is actually less of a concern for projects than on MacOS. Also, Linux users are often willing to build packages themselves if their distribution isn't fast enough off the mark. The expectations on MacOS are entirely different. End users expect a fully packaged installer, which requires expertise with the MacOS tools for that purpose. The package also needs to be signed if you don't want your users to go through the hassle of turning off the signature check (which is seen as a security hole) for installation and turning it back on afterwards. This requirement has been around for a while; any project that doesn't sign its packages will be seen as fly by night if not worse. So, you have to get a key from Apple. And then you need to check for any prerequisites, and preferably include them yourself (MacOS doesn't have package metatools like dnf that will take care of pulling in required dependencies). And if your package is licensed under the GPL, you can't even use the Apple Store; you have to do your own installer and provide the hosting for distribution. In addition to these process requirements you need to make sure that your installer runs cleanly and that the uninstaller likewise uninstalls cleanly. Again, on Linux that's the responsibility of the distribution, not the project (other than not being too profligate with what it sticks in the filesystem). So yes, project lifecycle management on MacOS requires a very different set of skills from that on Linux. -- Robert Krawitz <[email protected]> *** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com *** Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton ____________________________________________________________________________ darktable user mailing list to unsubscribe send a mail to [email protected]
