Subject: Re: "must have" packages
From: Gabriel Gerhardsson (mr.g@home.se)
Date: Sat Aug 25 2001 - 05:27:31 CDT
On Fri, 2001-08-24 at 23:28, Paul Rohr wrote:
> At 02:08 PM 8/24/01 -0700, Paul Rohr wrote:
> >At 03:24 PM 8/16/01 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> >>What I propose is that we (for packaging and other purposes) make a list of
> >>those features, platforms, and options that we find to be critical, and a
> >>"must have" for support. This can vary based on platform, distribution,
> >>etc... but they need to be in writing somewhere.
> >
> >Would anyone like to propose what our current set should be?
>
> To get the ball rolling, I'll go ahead and take a whack at this. The
> following proposal may be a bit controversial, but I think it's more-or-less
> on the money, and it should *certainly* spark a discussion.
[snip]
> level two: really should have
> ------------------------------
> Continuing down the download stats, you get into a stew of Unix permutations
> I don't even pretend to understand, but as best I can tell from the ever-
> shifting filenames:
>
> GTK > GNOME
> RPM > tar.gz > deb
> i386 > PPC
> en > intl
>
> It'd be nice to minimize that complexity as much as possible, and perhaps we
> could get it down as far as two configurations of required libraries:
>
> latest-and-greatest (RH 7.x, RPM, GNOME, etc.)
> ultra-compatible (RH 6.2, RPM, GTK, etc.)
>
> Then we could repackage one or both variants (of required libraries) in
> additional package flavors (.deb, .tar.gz, etc) as appropriate. However,
> I'd rather have someone else sort all that out. :-)
>
> ASSERT: We should have as few variants as possible here. Ideally, I'd
> think that there would only be two configurations of required libraries
> (bleeding-edge GNOME and ultra-compatible GTK), packaged up in as many
> flavors as people would like.
When I downloaded 0.9.0 I was very pleased to see that you had done both
'en' and 'intl' builds (I'm from Sweden, see). And I'm sure many
international users was to!
But to me it seams a bit clumsy to distribute international builds like
that. Here is why:
1. Download size. To force all international users to download a 20mb
file for every upgrade (yes, they could backup the dictionaries and so
on, but many people doesn't think of that).
2. Doubles the work for packaging. (ok, granted, there's not that big a
difference between 'en' and 'intl' builds, maybe that small difference
can be automated(?), but anyway)
3. Is it not so that the user can add words into the dictionaries? If
so, it may be a bit irritating if the dictionaries is replaced every
time you upgrade AbiWord.
So I was thinking, maybe it could be possible to distribute the
dictionaries separately from AbiWord. As one big rpm/deb/etc with all
dictionaries, or maybe even one rpm/deb/etc for each language.
Comments?
/Gabriel
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