From: David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org>
Date: 21 April 2008 11:43:55 BST
To: Francisco Oltra <foltra@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Central GNUstep software index?
On 20 Apr 2008, at 05:58, Francisco Oltra wrote:
Here's another proposal, don't know if it was considered or not.
Since one of GNUstep's goals it s to be portable across platforms,
and that portability is obtained by recompilation and not binary
distribution, and given that nowadays everyone loves a central
software distribution system where you can avoid to look for the
dependencies, download, unpack and build them by hand, wouldn't it
be great to have the equivalent of the BSD port system but based on
the GNUstep system instead of a specific OS, only requiring you
have the gnustep core installed ? another good examples to look at
are Ocaml's Godi or Perl's CPAN . Does that make sense?
I really like this idea in theory. In practice, I think it would be
something of a pain to implement.
As I recall, GNUstep Make has the ability to generate RPMs. It
would be really useful if this could be modified to allow other
packaging systems to be added easily. Generally, package managers
need:
1) A list of dependencies (or two lists - one for building, one for
running)
2) A list of which files will be installed
3) The version of the package being installed.
4) Location of the source tarball.
5) Long and short descriptions of the package
If we had a clean way of spitting these out then they could be piped
into a script for assembling the binary or source package for any OS
(even MSIs, in theory...). FreeBSD, for example, has a load of
infrastructure in the ports collection for building GNUstep ports,
but most GNUstep ports are horribly out of date, presumably because
it's a lot of hassle. Being able to do 'svn up && make package
PKG_FORMAT=FREEBSD' (or similar) and have it spit out the updated
version would make it a lot easier for packagers, and if we make
life easy for packagers then we are likely to see a lot more up-to-
date packages in distributions.
David