Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[David Chisnall]

On 8 Oct 2009, at 13:30, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> it's up to the packaging systems used by the distribution how they  
> do things, the task is much the same as with any other software, not  
> a GNUstep specific issue, and it's really not our concern how  
> packagers for different distributions do things.


I think this reinforces my original point.  GNUstep, at the moment, is  
not friendly towards packagers.  FreeBSD is about the only platform  
that has well-maintained up-to-date GNUstep packages (and, here, I  
include stuff built on top of GNUstep), although a few Linux distros  
have recently started updating their old GNUstep packages, so that may  
change soon.

It is not our concern how packagers choose to distribute things, but  
it should be our concern to make things easy for packagers.   
Currently, it is not, and the result is that people interested in  
developing with GNUstep find that they have no recent GNUstep package  
for their distribution of choice and then give up.

You are right that this is not a GNUstep-specific issue.  It is an  
issue that all software faces and successful projects tend to be the  
ones that make life easy for packagers.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good GNUstep is if it's  
too much effort for people to install, because they simply won't ever  
try it.

David

-- Sent from my STANTEC-ZEBRA