[Gambas-user] gambas not installed by package manager problems.

[Bruce]

On 5/11/20 12:50 am, Bruce Steers wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Nov 2020 at 02:26, Bruce <adamnt42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 4/11/20 6:14 am, Bruce Steers wrote:
>>> It's a bit of a problem if you have compiled and installed gambas
>> manually
>>> and not just installed via package manager.
>>>
>>> On my system i can use theGambas "Create Installation package" function
>> and
>>> create an installation package but i cannot use it as the .deb file it
>>> makes then checks the dpkg database for what i have installed and does
>> not
>>> find anything gambas so gives errors.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, this is what I was raving about approximately a month ago.
>>
>> There are several possible solutions.
>> 1. Use autotools as Brian G suggests. Yhis is probably the easiest,
>> but.. there are some rare situations with the autotools package builder
>> that I don't think were ever resolved from years ago. You probably won't
>> encounter them (and I've got no recollection what they were either so
>> don't ask.) And don't forget that this is how all the gambas components
>> get installed when you build gambas from source. So if you have problems
>> look at those make data.
>>
> 
> so that would get the package i'm trying to install installed but still got
> the other issues
> were apt/dpkg does not know gambas is installed.
> 
> 
>> 2. NASTY! hack the packae builder so it doesn't generate the package
>> dependencies in the spec file. (oh, I'd never do that ever ;-) )
>>
> 
> I'm thinking more along the lines of hack apt/dpkg , somehow manually add
> gambas packages to
> the database without actually installing :)
> Or how to make a HD repository (like the CD repositories you can add
> If we could somehow get the compiled source into a HD repository and have
> apt use that?
> 
> 
> 
>> 3. Write you own installer. I have tried to do this a guzumteen times
>> but something else has always come up and got in the way.  All the stuff
>> is there in the IDE and the project metadata to do this and it really is
>> just a matter of moving files to where they need to go. Perhaps we could
>> collaborate?
>>
> 
> I already have too , just simple bash scripts. I figured a gambas app
> hardly needs an installer,
> just add the dependencies/components and hey presto it works (it just lacks
> menu adding) :)
> I made 2, one just adds supplied dependencies.
> the other tries to run a gambas app and if it fails it extracts the missing
> dependencies from the error message and keeps trying to relaunch the app
> until it's got everything it needs.
> But these only work for standard apps, it cannot install it's own custiom
> components.
> 
> But again i don't really see a problem with the installer, for the most
> part it's going to work fine for most people, it only seems to have an
> issue with people who have compiled gambas not installed through repo.
> That's what i think need a solution :)
> If dpkg could see the compiled gambas as installed then problem solved :)

i don't know about dpkg but for rpm based installation this is entirely 
the problem. rpm knows only about packages and nothing about installed 
shared libraries. It is only looking in the rpm database. I presume dpkg 
is similar.

In fact thinking from one perspective, this is entriely politically 
correct. The whole idea of a package manager is to look at things from a 
package level only.

With rpm it is possible to force an install to ignore the package 
dependency specifications (--nodeps). I presume that there is one for 
dpkg as well. However, in general I have found that this is an easy way 
to end up in a "broken package" situation that is not desireable.

At the end of the day it looks like binary package distribution is only 
useful when Gambas has been installed from a package, for locally built 
Gambas installations autotools is the option.



Oh, I almost forgot again. Don't know whether it would work with dpkg 
but with rpm yous can create "fake" packages that contain nothing and 
install them, thus satisfying the package manager's desire for 
"mydistro-libpickledonions-5.16-0.rpm" or whatever. There is a name for 
this approach that escapes me but that is another way to cope with 
"uninstalled deps". They are pretty easy to create, I had to do this 
when my distro mucked up the package structure for gambas a few years ago.

b