On Saturday 15 October 2005 17:26, Mike Hearn wrote:
Jean-Francois, perhaps a good way forward would be to use the same binaries inside both the autopackage and the static RPMs. That way, you can benefit from the tools we've written to automatically detect and correct such problems yet people who want an RPM and nothing else are still happy. It means you and Aaron can share the workload also, freeing up more time for actual Inkscape hacking.
I may be wrong, and wouldn't want what I'm about to say to be construed as impolite, but I'm not a strong believer in the autopackage concept. I prefer the "system-wide package manager" approach. And judging by the download figures, I'm not the only one preferring RPMs to autopackages.
I expect Aaron would be happy to send you a pre-made tarball of the RPMs, or alternatively you can just run the autopackage with the -x switch to extract the contents. These can then be turned into an RPM.
You know, if all there is to make the static RPMs more widely installable is adding a few libraries, then so be it. I have a new RPM compiled with pango included that is waiting to be uploaded. I suppose I could even install another distro and run it under Xen or somesuch to test these RPMs. Yeah, I would even go that far as long as I don't have to reboot.
I suppose it all boils down to this:
- Either I create the static RPMs on my rather bleeding-edge distro and add statically every library that is not available on other not-so-bleeding-edge distros. This is rather straightforward;
- Or I try to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to run rpmbuild against GTK+ 2.4.x when 2.8.x is installed on my system. I suppose it must be possible.
In other words, I don't know the official policy about what should be done. Maybe no one cares as long and the RPMs behave as expected and no one complains?
The way I see things is that the static RPMs are created rather as a short-term and convenient solution for people using Linux distributions which do not provide Inkscape or a recent version of it or an easy way of upgrading it.
Which means that the overweight of the static RPMs is not that big an issue. But I may be completely wrong here.
Am I boring anyone to death already?
Jef