On 09:09 Fri 01 Oct , Thomas Kahle wrote: > Hi Francois and everyone, > > > Have you tried to contact upstream (Tim Daly) to see if being packaged in > > a distro is something they are interested in. > > I personally would last rite it and possibly revisit the situation every so > > often. If it doesn't even build I am not sure there is a point in keeping it > > in the tree. > > I'm in contact with Tim Daly now, who seems very interested in getting > axiom to work on Gentoo. The main problem that I see here, and also with > the developers of Macaulay 2, is that upstream often does not feel any > urge to unsplit their build systems. They just build internal copies of > whatever they need. So here with axiom it is that the already internal > gcl builds an internal gmp and upstream would like it better to apply > our gentoo patches to that internal gmp instead of making it work with > system wide gmp. I find it hard to communicate that internal copies are > evil(TM). How do you guys handle that ?
You may communicate that they are simply a requirement for many Linux distributions, and leave it at that. One way to satisfy both sides might be to have the bundled libraries optionally built. Many developers of packages with specialized dependencies want to make it easier to install their code, so they want to have the option available (and likely on by default). What I recommend the package should do is: - probe the system to autodetect whether the dependency is installed - allow manual overrides via configure flags - if not found, then build/install the bundled version -- Thanks, Donnie Donnie Berkholz Sr. Developer, Science Team Gentoo Linux Blog: http://dberkholz.wordpress.com
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