[Gambas-user] Idea - Builds & Package Creation

[Marius Mauch]

Daniel Campos wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> Mmmh... I think the "Stupid" word is not very polite, may be it is not a 
> good idea to use it to talk about  new Gambas propposals or ideas, at 
> least in a public list. May be in a bar with two old friends and a lot 
> of bier would be acceptable.

 From a package maintainer POV it is a stupid idea as it makes our life 
harder.

> Apart from this, I think it is possible to do it already, but not using 
> rpm or deb packages, which are designed to be modular, so you have not 
> to download many times the same pieces of code, but one of these 
> "windows-like" installers for Linux that  already exist, that try to 
> manage the software for a lot of distributions at the same time, 
> including libraries, or downloading them automatically from the 
> internet, detecting previously the Linux flavor. In that sense, may be 
> any code developer could be interested in adding support for 
> http://autopackage.org/ , for example.

IMO the problem is that people bring the Windows mindset of 
download-execute-install (by clicking next->next->next) to Linux 
systems, where this is completely misplaced as it removes the package 
from the control of the package manager.
All current package managers (or their respective frontends) have a nice 
dependency resolver that can fetch and install dependencies 
automatically, so there really isn't an argument to include all deps 
into the package. Instead it would result in several problems:
- things would have to install in a package-specific location (like 
C:\Program Files\foo in Windows)
- no central upgrade management, especially important for security fixes
- potential for conflicts if multiple versions are installed

Marius