distribution and packaging (Was: Re: Themes (again))

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Liam Proven wrote:
> On 27 September 2013 16:21, Xavier Brochard <xavier@alternatif.org> wrote:
> > I mean "like others do" :  release a set of tarball files and a few
> > instructions to setup.
> *Tarballs*? Seriously?!
do you mean source tarballs? those we have.. .and building is up to you. 
Except perhaps the core system which requires tweaking, all the rest is 
a matter of configure && make install or even just make install.

Binary distribution shall be done by the provided package system of your 
OS. Linux, BSD and Solaris all have a variety of "packages". Inside 
there is a tarball or a zip, but you get all the dependency tracking.

In the long-term, in the view of the possibility of having a "Gnustep 
dedicated distribution", GAP plans to have an installer. Something was 
sketched out, nothing implemented. It is jus tlow priority, it is much 
bettter to integrate in other distributions.
> No. Not tarballs. That is the last thing that we want to be doing. Not
> in 2013. In 1993, yes; in 1998, maybe.
>
> No, any current distro has package management, automatic dependency
> resolution, etc. This helps, and tarballs completely break it and
> leave a distro that cannot be upgraded or even maintained.
>
> We have .deb packages and a SUSE VM image.
The SUSE VM image has RPMs, I guess Richard S. could  easily provide the 
used packages.

The ideal thing would be to have the various distributions package 
gnustep properly, but that might be a lost war. OpenBSD and FreeBSD are 
to my knowledge in a usable shape. We might want to provide "our" 
repositories for the major distributions.

> Perhaps packages for the big 3 distros - Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. That
> covers 75% or so of FOSS Unix users. Either for the current version
> only, or perhaps in the case of Ubuntu, the current stable version.
>
> With modest work, it is possible to produce packages that will install
> on both Ubuntu and Debian - that would be best of all.
I regularly test against Debian, that should assure things working on 
Ubuntu. Hoever my setup (and this is true for all systems I test my 
GNUstep software on) is:
- all dependencies which are provided by packages are installed with 
packages (this is usually true on ALL system, at most, I configure 
without an option, e.g. TLS or ICU)
- gnustep core, developer and user application and sources, etc are 
installed from source

This setup helps me to "proof" my apps and to test the operating system. 
If sometething in the final distribution packages works worse than for 
me, it is a packaging and/or config problem.

I test this way currently:
- NetBSD 6 x86-32 on two system, one with gcc and one with clang / 
NetBSD 2 on sparc-32 with gcc
- FreeBSD 8 with gcc4 standard, FreeBSD 9 with clang all on x86-32
- OpenBSD with gcc on x86-32
- Linux Gentoo on x86-32 and -x86-64
- Linux Debian on x86-32
- Linux Debian on ppc-32
- Solaris 10 on sparc v9 and gcc 4.8 (software and compiler by OpenCSW)

I also have an older laptop where I install debian packages of most 
software and where I used to test applications against "release", so 
that packagers had an easier job. However, debian packages are so 
merciless outdated that no software will run (gorm decoding problems) 
thus I sadly stopped this practice, which helped finding more than one 
incomaptibility.

Currently these setups work all quite reasonably, compared to some time 
ago, we improved our portability, especially in base!
I used to test but currently the machine is broken or gnustep is broken:
- Debian / HURD (machine broken, I hope to setup it again. GS used to 
work fine 2 years ago, a couple of months ago at the last run it was 
very very unstable)
- Solaris 8: machine works, I have patches, I fail to link/run stuff, 
must be a configuration problem
- IRIX/mips R4k4, R10k ... problems with gcc, ffcall/libffi, gave up, 
although I'd love to get it working again and test on MIPS, I used to 
have a nice MIPS netbook with linux
- more strange and obsolete stuff

As you see, a quite wide range of setups which help testing, find 
portability bugs and prove that the quality of our frameworks and 
application is constantly improving. GAP stuff really got better by all 
this testing, as much as people hate me when I find bugs in obscure 
platforms.
> I have been experimentally building minimal Ubuntu & Debian systems
> with a GNUstep desktop built purely from the packages in those distros
> for a couple of years now. It works reasonably well, but I found
> GWorkspace too unstable to use - it dies continually, seldom running
> for as long as 10-15 minutes, and when it goes it takes all GNUstep
> apps with it.
This is very strange. I use GWorkspace daily. Which version are you 
using? I hope not the debian packages: they are so old that it is a 
shame (3 releases behind), the bug fixed since that release is enormous.
If you are instead running the latest release or even a snapshot of 
current, the matter needs to be investigating. GWorkspace is close to a 
new release.
> I would strongly advocate Ubuntu - it is by far the most widely-used
> Linux now, it has freeware proprietary addins (unlike Fedora) and is
> relatively small and simple (unlike SUSE). It is very easy to strip
> down to a bare system - just start with Ubuntu Server, which has no X
> or anything preloaded. Ubuntu's hardware support and support for
> proprietary addins is considerably better than Debian; to get Debian
> fully working on my hardware took 48h of concentrated work and I never
> got my sound card working. Ubuntu took 90min. In my fairly extensive
> experience, this can be regarded as typical.
I used to advocate Debian, luckily I never had trouble installing on my 
hardware, although their policy of firmware makes things tough. I don't 
like what Ubuntu is doing to the desktop and their ambiguous 
relationship. But debian just apparently broke the sound on my 
test-laptop.. it tells me to install a certain firmware package which 
isn't there, it is a pain.
Firmware support is getting worse and worse for opensource (check 
FreeBSD, NetBSD video drivers...) there is no care, people are fine with 
windows and their android tablets. FOSS seems to be off its peak without 
ever having it reached :(

Anyway, I hope that by testing against debian and supporting debian, 
ubuntu shall work too.

Riccardo