Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
David R. Morrison wrote: On Oct 4, 2005, at 3:09 PM, Max Horn wrote: Yo folks, in the following I'd like to tell you a little story that happened to me today... it is, unfortunately, kind of a sad story, but I hope we can turn it into one with a happy ending eventually :-) [snip] Hi Max. I've been aware for some time that we had some problems along these lines. Although we pay lip service to the idea that fink could be used without having the developer tools installed (and relying only on binary packages), in practice -- as you point out -- none of the fink developers do this themselves and so it doesn't get tested very often. Looking into this is, unfortunately, rather far down on my own list of priorities for fink-y things to work on. I'm hoping that your story will motivate someone to step forward who wants to work on this aspect of fink. I remember having told a similar story here at least a year ago :-( It is of course rather embarrassing when you just told someone it takes 5 minutes to install Fink plus Octave and then after two hours you are still working on it.. In short: Fink works (and always has) on the basis that as soon as you use fink install or fink selfupdate (which may involve an install automatically and it may need not only to install a new version of the fink package, but also to build new versions of apt, dpkg, gettext etc)), you need the developer tools. Installing the make package is almost useless, the missing make command is just the first indication that the developer tools are needed. The FAQ says this actually rather early and clearly in section 6. If you only use apt-get, you don't need the dev tools. The new --use-binary-dist flag in fink rather muddies the waters here, because it seems to promise that you can use the binary dist with the fink command which is only partly true. In FinkCommander things are more clearcut: If you stay with the binary stuff, you can get away without developer tools (with some exceptions like scilab which actually uses make in its postinstall phase), if you do anything involving source, you need them. We should probably state somewhere more prominently that if you want to work with Fink, you need a complete installation of MacOSX, and this involves - the BSD tools and X11 from the system installation - the Xcode developer tools I don't think there is any serious excuse nowadays (except lack of information) for not installing all this. It takes 10 minutes and 2GB of disk space. -- Martin --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
Max Horn wrote: [] He then got an error message by the installer, telling him about a problem setting up his .profile. Luckily I was around and he knew that I was somehow affiliated with this Fink thingy. And indeed I managed to fix the broken installation by changing his .profile to .bashrc (no idea why this was necessary; interestingly, on my PowerBook, also running 10.4, the exact opposite is the case: .profile works fine, .bashrc apparently is being ignore). Well I already filed a bug report for this (may not be our fault, but we still have to deal with it, I am afraid). There has been a bug report on this for a long time (#1020637). The problem is that the pathsetup script, when run automatically by the installer, sometimes suffers from a split personality syndrome: In the middle of its execution, it seems to forget that it runs as $USER and starts thinking it is root. Therefore it creates ~/.profile with root as owner (but in the correct home directory of $USER) and worse, when it tests whether the new setting works, it does the test as root and concludes that it doesn't work. The only thing usually necessary to repair this is to run sudo chown $USER ~/.profile after the installation. Putting the source /sw/bin/init.sh into ~/.bashrc is not considered good practice, because .bashrc is executed in every subshell, but not in a login shell. I would have repaired the pathsetup script a long time ago (and I have an improved version here) if only this problem could be reproduced reliably. I can tell you that I ran many hours of tests and have run the Fink installer probably a couple of hundred times with all kinds of settings, but the problem is that you don't know what exact environment the Apple installer runs its postflight script in. In theory it runs with root privileges, but with $HOME and $USER set to the user who runs the installer. Some other information like the user's login shell is imported from netinfo etc, but you don't know what exactly. In any case, I think we have a lot less complaints now since pathsetup is run automatically with the installer compared to the time when we recommended to do this after the installation. -- Martin --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:56 AM, Martin Costabel wrote: If you only use apt-get, you don't need the dev tools. The new -- use-binary-dist flag in fink rather muddies the waters here, because it seems to promise that you can use the binary dist with the fink command which is only partly true. Yeah, my instructions to new users has always been install Fink with the binary installer, then use apt-get. If it's desirable, we could make fink-the-program display a Very Prominent Warning if someone tries to run it without the dev tools installed, suggesting that the user either install the tools or use apt. Yea or nay? We may also want to talk with the FinkCommander folks to see if they can make FC deal with this situation gracefully. Dave PGP.sig Description: This is a digitally signed message part
[Fink-devel] Re: Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
Martin Costabel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: We should probably state somewhere more prominently that if you want to work with Fink, you need a complete installation of MacOSX, and this involves - the BSD tools and X11 from the system installation - the Xcode developer tools I don't think there is any serious excuse nowadays (except lack of information) for not installing all this. It takes 10 minutes and 2GB of disk space. Moreover, BSD tools, X11 and XCode are now present on Tiger DVD (I can't remember if it was already the case on Panther). You don't need to go to developer.apple.com and create an account anymore as it used to be. Make it a requirement for a Fink installation sounds reasonable to me. Sébastien --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
On Oct 5, 2005, at 6:55 AM, Dave Vasilevsky wrote: On Oct 5, 2005, at 2:56 AM, Martin Costabel wrote: If you only use apt-get, you don't need the dev tools. The new -- use-binary-dist flag in fink rather muddies the waters here, because it seems to promise that you can use the binary dist with the fink command which is only partly true. Yeah, my instructions to new users has always been install Fink with the binary installer, then use apt-get. If it's desirable, we could make fink-the-program display a Very Prominent Warning if someone tries to run it without the dev tools installed, suggesting that the user either install the tools or use apt. Yea or nay? We may also want to talk with the FinkCommander folks to see if they can make FC deal with this situation gracefully. How about if instead we actually try to make it work without the dev tools? Things were originally designed that way... And particularly if we ever get the project of more frequent bindists off the ground, this could be useful. -- Dave --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
Am 05.10.2005 um 09:25 schrieb Martin Costabel: Max Horn wrote: [] He then got an error message by the installer, telling him about a problem setting up his .profile. Luckily I was around and he knew that I was somehow affiliated with this Fink thingy. And indeed I managed to fix the broken installation by changing his .profile to .bashrc (no idea why this was necessary; interestingly, on my PowerBook, also running 10.4, the exact opposite is the case: .profile works fine, .bashrc apparently is being ignore). Well I already filed a bug report for this (may not be our fault, but we still have to deal with it, I am afraid). There has been a bug report on this for a long time (#1020637). The problem is that the pathsetup script, when run automatically by the installer, sometimes suffers from a split personality syndrome: In the middle of its execution, it seems to forget that it runs as $USER and starts thinking it is root. Therefore it creates ~/.profile with root as owner (but in the correct home directory of $USER) and worse, when it tests whether the new setting works, it does the test as root and concludes that it doesn't work. The only thing usually necessary to repair this is to run sudo chown $USER ~/.profile Actually we did that, but it didn't help. Odd... after the installation. Putting the source /sw/bin/init.sh into ~/.bashrc is not considered good practice, because .bashrc is executed in every subshell, but not in a login shell. Yeah I know, but in this case it was the only way we got it to work :-/ Bye, Max --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:18:12AM -0700, David R. Morrison wrote: How about if instead we actually try to make it work without the dev tools? Things were originally designed that way... And particularly if we ever get the project of more frequent bindists off the ground, this could be useful. What packages (.pkg, not fink) are part of the base system install? Do we get all the /usr/bin BSD commands, or will we continue to have to have packages like gzip and tar be essential to make sure dpkg can use those commands (/me notes ? As for the case at hand, we could easily make 'make' essential and a dependency of 'fink'. Or there is a pure-perl implementation of the make command available we could embed in fink (or at least its build suite). If the issue is that fink needs certain things only when not using bindist, maybe we should have 'selfupdate' give a huge warning iff those things are not present and user tries to selfupdate using cvs or rsync. dan -- Daniel Macks [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:25:37AM +0200, Martin Costabel wrote: There has been a bug report on this for a long time (#1020637). The problem is that the pathsetup script, when run automatically by the installer, sometimes suffers from a split personality syndrome: In the middle of its execution, it seems to forget that it runs as $USER and starts thinking it is root. Therefore it creates ~/.profile with root as owner (but in the correct home directory of $USER) and worse, when it tests whether the new setting works, it does the test as root and concludes that it doesn't work. The only thing usually necessary to repair this is to run sudo chown $USER ~/.profile after the installation. If the file is being created in the correct place, we know $HOME is not getting corrupted. That means we can check its owner, then chown the dotfile acordingly and make sure we're running under that user when doing the test. dan -- Daniel Macks [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Binary Installer (0.8.0) not very usable on a non-dev system
On Oct 5, 2005, at 9:41 AM, Daniel Macks wrote: On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 09:18:12AM -0700, David R. Morrison wrote: How about if instead we actually try to make it work without the dev tools? Things were originally designed that way... And particularly if we ever get the project of more frequent bindists off the ground, this could be useful. What packages (.pkg, not fink) are part of the base system install? Do we get all the /usr/bin BSD commands, or will we continue to have to have packages like gzip and tar be essential to make sure dpkg can use those commands (/me notes ? All of the standard BSD commands are there, if the user has installed BSD.pkg. I believe that this may have required a custom install at some point in time, but I think its installed by default now. Certainly I wouldn't suggest anyone try to use fink without this being present, and perhaps fink should test for its presence. As for the case at hand, we could easily make 'make' essential and a dependency of 'fink'. Well, binary-only users shouldn't need 'make'; we should try to design things so that they don't. If the issue is that fink needs certain things only when not using bindist, maybe we should have 'selfupdate' give a huge warning iff those things are not present and user tries to selfupdate using cvs or rsync. More than just a warning: I would like to see the cvs and rsync options as being available only if you have the dev tools installed. Binary-only users should be using the point update method. -- Dave --- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
