Subject: Re: "must have" packages
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2001 - 14:58:45 CDT
At 09:56 PM 8/25/01 +0200, Gabriel Gerhardsson wrote:
>On Sat, 2001-08-25 at 15:58, Martin Sevior wrote:
>> A better solution would have been to provide the 20 different dictionaries
>> as 20 seperate rpms. However this would have been a lot of work and taken
>> a lot of time. Time is my number one limited resource.
>>
>> If someone goes to the trouble of packaging those 20 ispell hashes into
>> rpms, this problem won't arise again. We'll just leave on SourceForge and
>> people can download then as they need them.
>>
>> So we need a volenteer to do this. Someone for whom a 20 megabyte download
>> is a pain but who never the less needs more than just an english ispell
>> hash.
>>
>> Sound familar? Any volenteers? No coding needed. Just the time to turn
>> binary file into a rpm. This would be a great help and I won't make any
>> more intl rpm's before 1.0.
>
> [ ... ]
>
>But I could do (some of) these dictionary builds (rpm). Mainly because
>it's a one-time thing (right? the dictionaries doesn't have to be
>repackaged that often), and maybe a suitable first-time job.
Gabriel and Martin,
Thanks guys, that sounds like a perfect solution. Instead of releasing
-intl- versions in all of the various packaging formats, we can stick to
releasing:
- en-US binary packages for each release
- a diverse set of dictionary packages (which don't change per release)
That way, for each release, most people will just need to download the new
binary packages, but anyone who wants international support can download as
many dictionaries as they want, whenever they want.
For now RPMs would be a great start, although over time it might be nice to
also have downloads in other packaging formats, such as:
- .tar.gz
- deb (if that makes sense)
- .zip
But first things first. Let's all help Gabriel get the RPMs built for
Linux/Intel first, and then we can worry about other platforms & packages.
>Btw, it must be possible to make some script that does the rpms from a
>common set of install/uninstall/etc-scripts? (I mean, the only thing
>that's going to differ in the different packages is the dictionary
>hash-file, right?)
That sounds like a great way to handle it. IIRC, Dom's already built the
necessary dictionary hashes, so the script should be pretty simple to write,
given the necessary RPM knowledge.
>I have read some about making rpm packages, but I will probably need
>guidance.
There certainly ought to be enough RPM expertise among the many folks on
this list, so if you get stuck, feel free to ask whatever detailed questions
you have.
>(Now that you have done such a great job on the international support
>(multi-language on-the-fly spell checking and dictionaries for 20
>languages distributeable), I'm eager to let the international users take
>advantage of those great features as easy as possible. That's why I
>wrote the original mail.
>And it was also meant to be an idea among many others on how to make the
>packaging process more easy in the long run)
Exactly. I'd love to see more folks stepping up to help out with packaging
and evangelism ideas like this.
Thanks!
Paul
motto -- many hands make light work
PS: This is one of the many reasons I love working on Open Source software.
In two or three quick emails, the two of you have:
- zeroed in on the real problem here,
- come up with a simple, robust solution,
- decided who's going to do the work, and
- asked for help with the remaining hard bits.
It doesn't get better than that! :-)
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