Rant

[Thomas Mondoshawan Tate]

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On Mon, Oct 08, 2001 at 11:23:36PM -0700, Nathan England wrote:
> I understand the marketing perspective, but you missed my point.
> I could care less if they only want to put out the rpm binaries, it's
> the source I am after anyway.  But the source is getting harder and
> harder to find.  Unless it's in a srpm format.
>=20
> Thomas, if you write something to break up rpms into the tar.gz file, I
> would be very interested in that. Also, I'm going to look into alien.
> I've never heard of that.

Okay. Right now I'm a little busy with the GEye program (50% done on the
capture part -- GUI's finished, needs a little more work for some GTK
signals, and a segfault fixed and it should be at v0.3.0 -- the next feature
add cycle). I'll see about pulling down alien and examining the source,
along with a bit of the rpm's (*shudder*). Might have a prototype before the
week's out. Oh, and don't worry, none of my source packages come as anything
other than a tar.gz file -- if someone wants a prebuilt package, they're go=
ing
to have to find one from a third party. =3Dop

> I myself would more than likely only put out an rpm if I was a large
> company writing software, but I'd like to think that I would only
> release tar.gz files instead.  Maybe build a generic installer, or use
> loki's installer.  I appreciate all that Red Hat does for the open
> source community, but the Microsoft of the linux world is beginning to
> bother me.

Agreed, but I'm sure there are reasons why Ximian and others only releases
source in srpm format -- probably because they don't want to play around
with the build process when bringing developers up to speed, etc. Don't they
have read-only anonymous CVS access, though? If so, I'd think it would be
possible to pull the most recent release by way of a 'cvs checkout -t
<version_number_here>'.

> As long as they continue to put out tar.gz files of the source,
> everything is peachy, but when it only comes in srpms linux will begin
> to fall apart.   That's just my opinion. Unless there is an easy option
> for getting the source out of the srpm.

Well, if you just do an 'rpm -i <srpm_filename_here>' of an srpm, it will
unpackage the source into the /usr/src/REDHAT/SOURCES directory and not
touch your installed packages list at all. Also, I believe Midnight
Commander has the ability (via libvfs) to open .rpm and .srpm files as
directories. For this reason I believe srpms may be just a glorified tar.gz
file with special headers -- kinda like how Debian's .deb files are just
glorified ar archives.

Besides, since the majority of developers for Linux are the 3rd party
hackers out there, I doubt that they'll be distributing srpms only since
just packaging those dumb things requires an insane amount of preparation
via a spec file. Compare the two processes:

    tar.gz
    	  1. tar zcvf project-v0.0.0.tar.gz project_dir/
	 =20
    srpm
    	  1. Create a spec file
	  2. Make sure the syntax in the spec file is correct
	  3. Run it through rpm
	 =20
Since most coders are lazy as heck (speaking genericially), I doubt they'd
_want_ to use srpms. Not to mention how non-portable it would be. =3Dop

> Kurt comes to mind on this one.  Kde of course wants the largest market
> share of the desktop for it's Gnu/Linux users.  The developers for kde
> work their asses off (without funding like the ximian group <none that I
> know of, but I don't use kde, so I don't pay attention, honestly>) to
> put out some very impressive software.  I built all the kde 2.2.1
> packages from source and have it running on my slack system so I could
> see it, and though I've never much liked Kde, I must say, it's awesome.
> Back to my point, I can go to any kde mirror and find the tar.gz files,
> some in binary, others in source. And also the rpm's.  But always I can
> find the tar.gz

Kudos to Kurt and the KDE team! ^.^

> On the other hand, I remember a few months ago I went to the ximian site
> to get the source for something and after jumping through an hours worth
> of hoops and not finding any source outside of srpms, I gave up... Later
> I found that any source I want I have to get from the Debian
> directories, and it's usually a development cycle behind.
>
> Or maybe I'm just continually looking in the wrong spots. Though ximian
> has straightened out a little bit.  It's still a pain in the ass to get
> the source for all the ximian stuff if I wanted to build ximian gnome
> from source...
> Not that I'd want to anyway.  Gnome bothers me quite a bit as well!=20
> Can't wait for E 17.  But I'm addicted to Evolution. And now with well
> over 4k messages in different folders spread through many directories
> and vfolders, I'm too hooked to switch to kmail.  So I still use gnome,
> or the libraries anyway. =20

See above -- they might have a cvs repository you can get read-only access =
to.

--=20
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
phoenix@psy.ed.asu.edu
http://tank.dyndns.org

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