Re: binary kit and packaging

kazz> sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes: kazz> Could the binary kit for each OSen use each package style rather than kazz> _normal_ *.tar.gz as some binary kit had been made as RPM for Linux kazz> distributions in previous release? kazz> I thought: kazz> - Can't it reduce the cost for installation for system admin? kazz> - Can't it reduce the cost for building binary kits because major kazz> operating systems often provides XEmacs in their kazz> distributions. For me, I made FreeBSD version of binary kit in kazz> previous two releases. But I think most of FreeBSD users kazz> installed XEmacs from its package distributed, not binary kit. Not me. The problem is that all packaging systems I've seen (FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, RPM) are quite inflexible, especially in environments with distributed multi-architecture multi-version shared software installations where they are completely unuseable. Software which only exists in a native-packaged format therefore greatly *increases* the sysadmin cost out here. We've gone to great pains to make XEmacs binaries rather independent of the layout into which it is installed. Our tarball layout allows people to put the stuff pretty much wherever they want. It allows the same install documentation to be shared among architectures. Therefore, it is desirable to have all binary kits in the same general format. Having native packages as an add-on is certainly a good thing, but not in the absence of a regular binary kit. -- Cheers =8-} Chipsy Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla