[Gambas-user] Why Gambas is packaged in only one tarball without a configure script?

[Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado]

On 15/07/16 03:45, Jussi Lahtinen wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 4:30 AM, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado <
> iam at ...3607...> wrote:
>
>> On 14/07/16 21:44, Benoît Minisini wrote:
>>> Le 14/07/2016 02:28, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado a écrit :
>>>> Hi. In the page http://gambaswiki.org/wiki/howto/package , you give
>> some
>>>> indications to the packagers. You want one package per component.
>>>>
>>>> That's okay but I don't understand why are you bundling every component
>>>> in one "big" tarball without a configure script. You could create
>>>> individual tarballs with the configure script generated. That would make
>>>> quite easy to comply with your wishes.
>>>>
>>>> Some packaging tools make pretty hard to split big tarballs in small
>>>> packages. Specially during the update to a new version.
>>>>
>>>> Am I missing something? :)
>>>>
>>>
>>> I don't see what the problem is. Can you elaborate?
>>
>> Create one big fat package with tens of dependencies from a big tarball
>> is quite easy.
>>
>> On OpenBSD Ports, when the packagers want to split a package in various,
>> they use subpackages. The ports use a PLIST file which is a list of
>> files to include in the package. When subpackages are used, the
>> packagers need to generate the individual PLISTs by hand (almost 100 in
>> the gambas case). When the ports are updated to a new version, the
>> packager needs to generate again the PLIST by hand.
>>
>> With small tarballs, the packagers could create individual ports for
>> every gambas package. The updates and maintenance would be more simple.
>> The configure scripts would help to save build time in this case.
>>
>
>
> So instead of one tar ball, people would need to download and unpack
> multiple tar balls and then compile them individually!?
> I don't see how this would make things *easier*. PLIST thing sounds like
> broken packaging system.

Well, the package system works for GNOME or KDE which are quite more 
complex and bigger than gambas, so this is not broken. Other BSDs use 
similar systems.

Gambas could be distributed as small tarballs and the traditional big 
tarball with everything included. My request is not exclusive.