On Saturday 12 Nov 2005 14:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Chris Cannam wrote: > > We've never found the resources to provide _release_ binaries -- > > how are we ever going to provide snapshot ones? Admittedly the > > effort is probably only about the same, but even so. > > Automation! Set up a process.
That's fine if you have a single package (e.g. if Autopackage happens to work well), or at least a small number of packages, that you can build each time. It's not so good if you have a significant population of different distributions that really should be at least minimally user-tested. Building packages is easy enough when your target system is a known quantity. I build Rosegarden packages for Studio to Go! regularly. But I wouldn't want to try to offer a reliable package service for Debian unstable, for example, even though I use parts of it myself. I know this is all old hat, and I understand this is why Autopackage exists. I just don't believe, on the evidence I've seen, that Autopackage works well enough. It's also pretty much why Studio to Go! exists, come to that (that and the possibility of making some money back). > >>Inkscape has been using Autopackage <http://autopackage.org/> > [...] And I think the packages are pretty solid right now. OK, I gritted my teeth and downloaded the 0.42.2 autopackage. I pretended I didn't know the root password, so as to get it installed in my home directory. (Incidentally, autopackage should probably warn you that it's installing potentially huge amounts of stuff in a dotfile -- in my experience most people who really don't know their root passwords will be fairly constrained about disc space and won't necessarily respond well to finding that most of their space has gone somewhere they can't immediately see.) The result was broadly good. It installed a version of Inkscape that seems to work. (Judging from the ldd output, Inkscape is in C, right? Or at least it uses no C++ libraries.) All of the dependent libraries were already present in /usr/lib except for libpng1.2.so.0.1.2.8 which is found in ~/.local (dated some time in July, I don't know whether that's from a package previously installed using Autopackage or what). However, it did do the profoundly annoying thing that I remember from last time, which is that it blitzed my carefully tweaked K menu made with KMenuEdit (~/.config/menus/applications-kmenuedit.menu) and replaced it with a version of the Debian menu which it wrote into ~/.config/menus/debian-menu.menu. It actually deleted my original file altogether, without asking or creating a backup! (Incidentally, the last time I tried an Autopackage was for Lilypond. First it complained that I didn't have a new enough version of Ghostscript -- I thought Autopackage was supposed to avoid that sort of problem? -- I can't remember whether it refused to install and I pacified it by installing a newer version, or whether it was possible to overrule it somehow. Then it installed a binary that didn't work because of C++ binary incompatibilities, and blitzed my K menu. It was wrong in just so many ways that I really didn't fancy trying to follow up any fixes, which is why I didn't report it.) Chris ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list Rosegarden-devel@lists.sourceforge.net - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
