Re: New package managment

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>]

Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net> writes:

> Bryan Patrick Coleman wrote:

> I like autoconf/automake 

Me too. autoconf/automake are a *big* step forward over plain
handwritten Makefiles.

> what I think is majorly bad is the:
> 
> BAD (but typical) STORY:
> 
>    I want to run pingus (say)
>      ...I download...
>      ./configure ; make ; make install
>      ...it says I need 'clanlib'...
>      ...where is the clanlib home page?
>      ...search using Google/Yahoo/whatever...
                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^
Thats no longer needed, it will print out the url in a current
version and so make the download simpler, but it will be still
required to download all the stuff yourself.

> BETTER STORY:
>
> You go to the Pingus site and download a *tiny* script:
> 
>    pingus.autoweb
> 
>    ...which checks to see if clanlib is installed and if
>    not - knows a good place to download it from - so it
>    downloads a script from the clanlib site:

The idea is great an addition could be to download the tarball,
instead of the script and than have a script, lets call it
'autobuild', which adds a gui to the complete download/build
process. So: 

Download the tarball, extract it and run ./autobuild instead of
./configure && make. autobuild could then present a nice GUI wrapper for
the configure script (ggi had that sometime ago), the make process
and could handle autoweb. So for the new user installing a source
package would be just some gui clicking, while the advanched user
could still run all the autoweb, configure and make stuff himself. 

Hm, I have to think some more about autobuild, but it could be a neat
thing in combination with autoweb. But as you said the biggest problem
at the moment is the download process, so a autoweb, would much more
important. 

> If such a scheme were to become more widespread, it would do GREAT
> things for source-based packages.  People simply **HATE** following
> the paper trail to get all the libraries that a complex modern game
> needs.

Yep, the thing is that the process itself is trivial, but it takes
time to search throu all README's and INSTALL's to collect all the
libs, which are needed for the build and automatic mechanisem would be
really nice.

> This would reduce the entire installation to downloading a single
> script and running it at the command prompt.  It's possible one could
> imagine a Netscape plugin that would run autoweb scripts - and hence
> reduce it to a single keyclick.

Hm, don't like the idea of the Netscape plugin, since autoweb would
IMHO require user interaction (Really download 100MB? [y/n]), so it
would be needed to run it at the shell.

-- 
                                  http://dark.x.dtu.dk/~grumbel/pingus/ | 
Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel@gmx.de>             http://home.pages.de/~grumbel/ |
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