On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, Bill Janssen wrote:
I've just tried installing 2.4.1, and I've got a few suggestions for
packaging.
1. Put a plain-text version of readme.html in README, automatically
generated from readme.html (or whatever), as part of the src-dist
build process. I always hate it when I visit a README, and it says,
"You fool! You should be looking at doc/documentation/readme.html!"
He, he. I didn't put "you fool" in there. Maybe I should add that :) ?
If Apache Forrest, which is used to produce the web site, can be used to
generate plain text, then this should be used for sure. What I don't want
to do is maintain two versions of the docs, even one pagers.
2. Ditto for the INSTALL file.
3. Oh, and by the way, looking at readme.html is tough. The string
"doc/documentation/readme.html" will almost always be read as just
"documentation/readme.html". I'd suggest calling that directory
"doc/dist", or some such, instead of "doc/documentation".
4. If there's a top-level "build.xml" file, lots of users (me, too :-)
will think that they can just type "ant" to build the package. That
should either "just work", or you should rename the build.xml file
to something less obvious, like "to-be-invoked-by-the-Makefile.xml".
Renaming build.xml to something more obscure could be done.
Would you like to send in a patch ?
5. Get rid of editing the Makefile, if you can. Would you like me to
write an autoconf script for this?
Sadly, the alternative here is autoconf. If you'd like to write an autoconf
script that works for all the variants of Python/Java/OS currently supported
in the Makefile, that would be excellent.
Unless you're on Mac, editing JCC's setup.py is also required. If you write
an autoconf script for PyLucene, be sure to also include the generation of
JCC's setup.py, otherwise you've only addressed half of the problem.
I expect that cracking the nut of finding the JDK on each and every Linux
distro is going to present a challenge. Providing command line arguments to
override what configure finds is probably a must.
Thanks !
Andi..
