On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 15:09, Stewart Dean wrote: > I'd think it wouldn't have taken any longer to design the GNU packaging tools > and process > to build single-binary, host-portable output. A lot of thought has gone into > Mailman...a > little more into in packaging would have boosted its acceptance enormously
Most open source projects, mailman included, are designed to run on wide variety of systems, each with their own peculiar installation and run-time behavior. In fact your desire for a GNU tool to produce a portable binary installation is exactly what Mailman uses, it is called "autoconf" but is more familiar to people as "configure", the script that executes first to figure out how to make and install the package on a given system. No, its not a GUI tool, but its not hard to use and to be honest it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a GNU packaging tool for a host of reasons. Because packaging across a wide variety of systems is hard/impossible to do in a portable manner the responsibility for producing binary packages falls not to the open source project but rather the OS vendor. The OS vendor knows how to produce binary packages. All this means is you want to go to your vendor for a pre-built binary package with easy installation, not the open source project. In the Linux domain OS vendor equates to "distribution" (e.g. Red Hat, SuSE, gentoo, debian, etc.) For other commercial OS's such as Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP hpux, etc. you go to the company you bought your OS from. Or you do the installation yourself with "./configure; make install" -- John Dennis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/
