Re: To All Package Maintainers & Would-be Maintainers.
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
SY> <rant>
I understand your frustration, but that frustration is more XEmacs's
fault than the external package maintainers',
I would agree. Would it be difficult to switch from handcrafted make
files with handcrafter Local.rules makefile includes, into, say,
autoconf?
Each package subdir could have it's own ./configure. This would make
it possible to build individual modules (e.g. cvs co mail-lib +
./configure + make) which I think is very useful -- right now I can't
really point anyone that want to test new stuff in the `mail-lib'
package to the CVS repository without giving instructions on how to
build and install it. It would also be possible to actually TEST
individual modules. Right now I only use M-x byte-compile-file RET to
see warnings/errors.
Forcing everyone, that want to work on, or test stuff, to checkout
entire xemacs-package subverts the whole modularized idea, IMHO.
(3) Dependencies are getting out of hand. Furthermore, problems
with
dependencies still seem to occasionally get hidden unless you do a
make distclean.
This is a long-term project, but we need to do something about better
dependency handling.
Packages are a can of worms. You need dependencies, and the longer
the system are in use, the dependency system gets more and more
complex.
Silly Ideas Dept: use .rpm or .deb's? They have sufficiently complex
dependency systems, and more importantly; OTHER people spend time
improving the packaging system. It's possible to setup multiple rpm
databases, and it works even as non-root users.