Elwin Estle wrote:

How involved is the Linux process? I am familiar with basic ./configure, make, make install...but that's about it (I am guessing this is a bit more complex process?) I think one time I might have done something from an SVN tree...can't remember what it was or if the process even worked. I have an AMD Athlon machine running Slackware 12.2, also a Mac Mini with Leopard.

While we have traditionally favored autopackage because it allowed the work put into making a single package to serve users of many different linux distros, I don't think it is a bad idea to make distro specific packages at this point.

Slackware has always been a distro on which using the autopackage and even just building inkscape have been difficult for people. I'm not sure why as I've never used slackware. Anything you can do to better the situation for slackware users will be much appreciated.

What other distros should we look for packagers for? I believe Ubuntu is already covered by the PPA someone set up. Does fedora have any sort of continuous building system we could make use of? Do other people think contacting the normal distro packagers for platform specific help is appropriate?

Making autopackages is no harder than a typical configure, make process. There are different commands to call, that's all. Now setting up the dependencies and the build configuration is a slightly different story. Autopackaging is complicated by the fact that a single package can serve both the old and current c++ ABI and now even both x86 and x86_64 architectures. Building autopackages requires a willingness to learn about linking and check that libraries are linked properly so as to cause as little trouble as possible. There are also a few places in the codebase where we could use relaytool to make libraries optional at runtime. I think we will require a little bit of help from the autopackage project if we are going to get this service up and running again.

Aaron Spike