On Thu, March 24, 2011, David Chisnall wrote: > In the Linux world, almost nothing is actually written by the > distribution authors. The kernel comes from Linux, the core userland > comes from the GNU project, and so on. In Debian, for example, there is > no distinction between things like GIMP and thinks like the Linux kernel - > they are both provided via the same mechanism.
This is true - in principle. However on Debian-based systems we can use several repositories from which we install software. For example, we have debian-multimedia.org from which we obtain multimedia stuff more recent than what comes with the distribution. (the same is now possible on RPM-based systems, too, if you use tools like yum) In my previous post I wrote: > So what would be really useful for proper distro integration > would be not only providing packages of the GS libraries but > also the whole suite of GS-based applications built against the > most recent version of the libraries. Coming from the Debian > world I'd see this kind of approach as an "experimental" and > unofficial apt repository. This implies that *in principle* providing this kind of service is absolutely possible - setting up an apt (and/or yum) repository for GNUstep in which more recent replacements for the packages provided by the distros are provided. The problem here is that there are subtle differences between the ways those packages are packaged on different distros, even on Debian and Ubuntu they are usually not the same. This is all possible, but somebody has to do the work. I think it would be a good start to establish a convention to maintain distro-specific code like the `debian/' subdirectory or .spec files in the source repositories (this would apply ideally bo both GNUstep and GS-based apps). That would make maintenance easier for third-party maintainers (who may but not need to be the respective distro's maintainer for the GS packages). At the moment we're still far from all this. And as long as we don't improve (i.e. make access to recent ready-built packages for distro users easy and seamless) acceptance is likely to remain low. Cheers, M'bert -- ----------- / http://herbert.the-little-red-haired-girl.org / ------------- =+= I am not in a hurry. I prefer to cross the town. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
