On Sat, Jun 19, 2004 at 03:01:31PM -0400, Geoff Thorpe wrote:
On June 19, 2004 01:37 pm, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
way towards cutting the number of non-developers building from source down to zero.
I don't see why that should be a goal at all. You guys need to get rid of the mindset that building from source is some 1337 thing that mere mortals are not supposed to do. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for users to build from source, and we need to make sure it works for them. That's why for instance the configure script is checked into CVS; it is of course heresy to put generated files in CVS, but it lets users build without having to fight the autoconf tools. It's for the same reason that we have wineinstall. Of course I'm all for improving the binary packages, but it doesn't avoid the need to also support source builds.
Excellent, I'm glad this was said. One only has to look at the swing away from binary-distributions as a case in point - people *want* to eliminate unknown layers of patches, packaging, and divergence from the "real" thing. The original source, as distributed from the project itself, is the only sure way to get the same version of the code that is used (and thus, tested) by its authors. It is also the only way to know it tried to adapt itself appropriately to your system. Anything else involves a certain blind faith in the black-magic of distribution patching by people who are usually *not* authors of the upstream packages. Moreover, unless you pay for commercial support then you are pretty much obliged to use the unmodified upstream code if you want to have a meaningful discussion with other users/devs about problems or questions you encounter.
Hardly any win32 application runs 100% perfectly under Wine (hell, the same can be said on MS-Windows), and Wine is not yet a complete work (again, a shared characteristic with the "reference implementation"). Under these circumstances, the path of least resistance is surely to *encourage* users to be singing out of the same hymn book as the development community? I've tried binary wine packages on a few occasions and *always* had major problems. Wine, and more importantly the things
Did you report those problems?
For SUSE packages I would like to know.
Btw, my package mostly does ./configure make make install
The number of to-patche things (for automatic configuration) has been reduced greatly over the last years.
Ciao, Marcus