> Alastair:
> > How do people feel about packages vs source tarballs?
Jeff:
> Any reason to make it either/or?
For portability reasons, we're always going to ship tars and zips.
I'm just trying to decide whether we'd ever want to add packages.
> If you know how to make RPMS (which is what I assume you are talking about),
> why not pop one together for each release?
But, to answer your question:
o Binary releases are a lot of effort and aren't very portable.
Just look at hugs/src/distrib to see the hoops I have to jump through
to build a binary release for Win-32. And then on close examination
we find that the notion of a "Win32" platform to be a figment of M$s
imagination so we have to try to do both a Win-NT and a Win95 distrib.
Blech, blech, blech.
Similarily, we've got an x86 linux box - but do people want libc or glibc?
What if they're got sparc-linux? What if they have x86-free-bsd?
o Source releases are less problematic but still take effort.
eg One more thing that has to be changed if we reorganise the
Hugs directory structure.
o Which package format do we use?
RPM and Debian are both popular (there's a debian package but no rpm at
the mo). There's also a FreeBSD "port".
> And since we're letting one question lead to another... would it be possible
> to package the source tar with a unique root directory name? I.e. hugs-1.5,
> or hugs-May1998.
I'll give it a shot - but this messes up attempts to build
automatic scripts which build packages. We already have problems with
changing the filename of the tarfile from one release to another.
A
