Also, we should make a requirement that donated packages conform to the File-system Hierarchy Standard (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ or http://www.linuxman.com.cy/rute/node38.html). This shouldn't be an
Please also remember that the world is more than GNU/Linux systems. I am using NetBSD and FreeBSD, for example. I'm not in any way opposed to people providing binary packages for many kinds of GNU/Linux systems, but I wanted to point out that distribution issues go beyond this. In *BSD, packaging involves maintaining an entry in /usr/ports or /usr/pkgsrc, from which the program can be compiled and binary packages made. Particularly in NetBSD, the focus is on correct and clean pkgsrc control files rather than binaries, since there are so many different architectures. The transition from guile 1.4 to 1.6 has made this difficult, although I now realize that gnucash 1.8 can work with either. And, NetBSD pkgsrc now supports simultaneously installing guile 1.4 and 1.6: > /usr/pkg/bin/guile --version Guile 1.6.1 > /usr/pkg/guile/1.4/bin/guile --version Guile 1.4.1 I'm hoping to update the NetBSD pkgsrc for g-wrap and gnucash when I find some spare time. Because other programs don't link to gnucash, there should be no need to support having gnucash 1.6as well. Nothing much more than what exists now needs to be done to ease packaging for BSD systems: the two big things are portable code that relies on POSIX, and has portability mechanisms to deal with non-POSIX behavior, and the ./configure --prefix ability to put the resulting system in a different place (NetBSD uses /usr/pkg). I posted about a few bugs in 1.7.8, but they were easy to fix (lack of const correctness) and not very numerous. A larger issue which might be good to contemplate is how .so files to be dlopened get located. Right now this seems to be a LD_LIBRARY_PATH thing, and I have an aversion to searching in larger numbers of places for things, since it loses when multiple versions are installed in different prefixes. As I've said on the guile list, when a program installed with --prefix=/usr/foo wants to link a library it installed, it can open /usr/foo/libexec/plugins/bar.so explicitly, rather than putting /usr/foo/libexec/plugins in LD_LIBRARY_PATH and opening bar.so. The downside to this is running before installation, and I don't have a good answer for how to do both. Greg Troxel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gnucash.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
