Re: [XBoard-devel] www.tim-mann.org

[Tim Mann]

On Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:19:42 +0200, "h.g. muller" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Note that the way we used to distribute XBoard for Linux is becoming a
> bit outdated; Linux users nowaday expect to rely on the packaging system
> to download software and solve dependencies, by typing "apt-get install".
> A Debian package for XBoard would probably not contain the WinBoard stuff.
> So we should continue to host sources for WinBoard anyway, and Linux
> users should be able to build and install an XBoard from source with it.

The way we distribute xboard now isn't exactly outdated; it's just that
very few Linux end users get xboard directly from us.  Instead, the
distro vendors grab our .tar.gz release and repackage it for their
distros, and most users get it from the next release of the distro they
use.  Distro vendors don't usually pull stuff from CVS or git
repositories directly because they prefer something that the project
maintainers have tested enough to consider as a "release", so IMO we
should still do releases with version numbers and make .tar.gz files of
them available.

So we don't really have to change anything about how we release
xboard.  It's fine for us to build our own Debian packages and RPMs if
we want, and that may make it easier for some users to upgrade sooner
than their distros pick up our next release, but I don't think many
will do that.

-- 
Tim Mann  address@hidden  http://tim-mann.org/