Re: Packages that need helper apps outside of XEmacs.
Simon Josefsson <jas(a)extundo.com> writes:
> The users who care to download individual packages seem to be
the
> minority of experts. Maybe things will be different in several
> years, but that's how I see things "today."
You're right. I think the /intention/ is for users to install the
packages though (why take up the menubar with it otherwise).
You're making it sound like an either-or thing. I think the point is
that both the administrator *and* the user can choose which packages
to install. The administrator could install the packages he considers
useful to the majority of users, whereas the user could supplement
this list with her own packages of choice.
If everyone is happy with download SUMOs, why bother with packages?
/I/ do think packages add a value, but maybe it takes a while until
more people realize it.
The second sentence answers the first one. I would also add that the
current implementation makes it bothersome to deal with packages.
A proprietary packaging system takes time to maintain and
wouldn't
be reusable in other projects.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. A packaging system designed to
solve *our* problems might be easier to maintain than a generic
monster.
> * Whichever solution we choose will be unusable by many users.
I,
> for one, use Debian and don't want XEmacs to spawn `rpm' with its
> entire infrastructure.
Maintaining both .deb and .rpm isn't impossible.
Which doesn't really answer my complaint. :-(
> * Does RPM even run on Windows?
Does Cygwin count as Windows? If so, yes.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. That's like saying
"Q: does X work on Windows? A: do you count Windows NT as Windows?
If so, yes."
Cygwin is a very cool toolset, but it should not be a requirement for
using XEmacs. Cygwin is not Windows and not all Windows XEmacs users
are Cygwin users.
> * Managers like RPM and dpkg are way too complex for what we
need,
> and yet are woefully inadequate when it comes to solving problems
> we have. We need user-installable packages, installing packages
> in different locations, support for multiple XEmacs versions on
> the same machine,
Rpm/deb should handle this, I think. It's just tar/cpio/whatever
with a fancy interface, you can unpack it everywhere.
This is simply false. One of my past jobs involved building the
Debian packaging system on Solaris, so I'm intimately familiar with
workings of (parts of) dpkg. It can definitely not handle the things
I listed above, including unpacking the software to a chosen location.
(Of course, I'm not talking about flags to manually unpack the package
-- you can always do that, but then the scripts aren't run, the
database is not updated, and you can generally stick to tar as well.)