[M3devel] Rants about an improbable release

[Rodney M. Bates]

On 10/28/2016 10:44 AM, Olaf Wagner wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Oct 2016 09:42:38 -0500
> "Rodney M. Bates" <rodney_bates at lcwb.coop> wrote:
>
>> I agree, we very much need to make a new release.  There has been a lot
>> of development since the last one, especially for having a small developer
>> community.
>>
>> I have often thought I would be willing to do the work to do it, but every
>> time, I get stuck not having any idea what needs to be done.  For one
>> thing, I presume it entails verifying that things build and work on all
>> the various targets, which would further entail having access to one
>> of each of them.
>>
>> Are such machines available?  Any advice on how to proceed?
>
> I think the most important thing would be to have an agreement on
> - which platforms will be part of the release
> - how the release will be packaged and deployed.
>
> I'd advise to concentrate on a small number of important platforms,

OK, let's hear some nominations for important platforms.

I need AMD64_LINUX and LINUXLIBC6.  For the future, I would probably want
a Windows version, and there are some others using Windows regularly, I think.

Jay, where can we look for the latest more-aptly-renamed platform names?

or
> to have a simple standard procedure for all platforms (for example
> cross-compiled bootstrap archives)

Are these just tar files of /usr/local/cm3?  Do we want to keep using
cminstall?

We are still requiring several static libraries (that are not part of CM3).
These present installation problems, as most distros now do not include them
by default, and, worse, it is quite a detective job to track from a name
like "libmumble.a not found" to what package needs to be installed.  We
probably want to configure to use mostly dynamic libraries.  Or maybe
be able to use either?

and more convenient support for some
> of them (for example Debian packages).
>

Yes, this would be very good.  Then they could go in package archives, and
installation would be much easier.  But we would also need to decide how
to break things up into packages.  E.g., would the stuff in groups like
do-cm3-comm and do-cm3-ui be separate?  Just matching what is in the various
do-cm3-* scripts or the named groups in pkginfo.txt won't work, because they
are highly non-disjoint.  We need a partition.

Also, my understanding about packages is that, while putting together a
package that will work is not too difficult, some Linux distros have
stringent requirements about package contents that are a lot more work
to create.


> Olaf
>

-- 
Rodney Bates
rodney.m.bates at acm.org