Re: [Fink-devel] Suggestions for a response?
On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 11:49:09PM -0800, Trevor Harmon wrote: On Mar 17, 2005, at 10:58 PM, D. H?hn wrote: Kurt: An ISIS person: | We have limited support staff and resources to support | ISIS, let alone support the Mac OS X platform. But the Fink community does not. You should make that very clear to him. Yes, there may be a failure to communicate here. Kurt, I think the ISIS guys assumes that you want him to do all the development and testing of the Fink packaging, when in fact all you are asking (I believe) is that he make a few tweaks that would allow the Fink community to handle the development, testing, and distribution themselves. [...] all they need to do is write a little .info file. I cannot see what is so hard about it. IME, most of the difficulties in writing a .info file usually come from figuring out how to get a thing to compile at all, and secondarily fine-tuning the dependencies and verifying packaging policy. Given that they already know its dependencies and how to compile it, all they need to do is provide the exact recipe they would use to do so. Then some Finkster or Finkstress can deal with writing the .info. Given a list of what libs and other support tools need to be installed and complete instructions for building it from the command-line, it's pretty simple to put together a first whack at a .info. dan -- Daniel Macks [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks --- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595alloc_id=14396op=click ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Suggestions for a response?
Thanks very much for all the feed back! That definitely helped. The last thing I want to do is stress out the usgs team. /sw/fink/10.3/local and enjoy on my own. Which is what I do for 3 or 4 packages right now. Always a good suggestion. I don't think he was talking about disk space overhead. He was likely referring to the extra effort involved in creating and testing a Fink .info file. Could be. Which is what the fink community would do (e.g. I would do all this) Yes, there may be a failure to communicate here. Kurt, I think the ISIS guys assumes that you want him to do all the development and testing of the Fink packaging, when in fact all you are asking (I believe) is that he make a few tweaks that would allow the Fink community to handle the development, testing, and distribution themselves. You are correct. I need to make that more clear. Fink has _nothing_ to do with the runtime. You should make that very clear. Of course there are some tools needed to I think what he means is that Fink is designed exclusively for Mac OS X. Thus, any effort that the ISIS people put into Fink would only benefit those who run both Mac OS X _and_ Fink, which is a small fraction of a small fraction of their total user base. Actually, Mac OSX is becoming a large fraction of the science community and that same community is rapidly discovering fink. MER flight operations was about 75% Mac of the laptops. About 95% of the flight ops workstations were linux, but could become a substantial amount of mac's between now and the next landing on Mars. This confuses me. Is DarwinPorts bundled with Mac OS X? Otherwise, I don't see how the end user could get away with not installing anything. Having never even looked at darwin ports I have not a clue. It would do me good to go look. Writing .info files is not trivial. I've written several of them, and the tricky ones can blow your entire afternoon (or more). ISIS I expect this to be an extemely difficult info file to write, but that is why I am thinking that I'll get this done before 2007 ! :) http://schwehr.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/ --- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595alloc_id=14396op=click ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
[Fink-devel] Suggestions for a response?
Hey All, Any suggestions on what to respond with to with this? I was hoping to get the USGS ISIS image processing system into fink next year. I would like to respond to this guy in a positive way that makes him think of fink as a good thing and not adding to his load. Any and all suggestions welcome! The proprietary code part is a problem, but if it is truely small, I may be able to help replace that code for them when I next get time/funding to work on mission software stuff. Having a full fink setup with all necessary software would be such a huge win for the science team (an maybe I could spend less type in the sysadmin/training role and more on science processing!) -kurt http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisSupport/viewtopic.php?t=472 Hi Kurt... Adding ISIS to Fink is not feasible at the moment for the following reasons: ISIS is built entirely independant of the Fink environment. This is a concious decision we made because we felt the Fink overhead was significant and unnecessary (and we still feel that way). There is some proprietary code used in ISIS, albeit a very small number of routines, but proprietary none-the-less. The effort required to make ISIS Finkable would be in addition to our already preferred distribution method (rsync) and probably substantial in comparison to our current development environment (you do realize you are asking us to migrate development, or at least support, of Mac ISIS to the Fink environment). We have 3rd party software dependancies for the Mac that exist only in binary form. We would like to take advantage of the availability of binary versions of software where ever possible to minimize support. These are, but not limited to: OpenMotif A package called PGPLOT GNU Fortran Compiler (g77) We have limited support staff and resources to support ISIS, let alone support the Mac OS X platform. Fink is a great tool to migrate Unix/Linux software to the Mac platform, but the downside is that Fink software cannot run independant of that environment. Our goal is to provide ISIS to the widest community possible and minimize maintainence and installation difficulties. In my opinion, DarwinPorts (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/) provides more flexible (runs natively in the Mac environment) and appealing (does not require the enduser to install anything) ISIS software development support. With this approach, our ISIS developers can install the necessary 3rd party software ISIS depends on and only those software tools. We can then provide these dependancies (i.e., shared libraries) with the ISIS distribution. This scenario is obviously directly in conflict with the Fink policy as you state. At this time, we do have a consistant development and distribution configuration for all operating systems we support (Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X). In my opinion, adding Fink to this mix creates additional overhead we cannot at this time support. - This was a response to my post: I am looking into adding ISIS to fink (Mac OSX packaging tool) before the next Mars lander mission. The fink policy is to only allow systems that can be built from source. Unfortunetely, the rsync distribution mechanism makes in nearly impossible for fink to grab a snapshot of ISIS. I would have to rsync the source myself and create my own snapshot (which I would prefer not to do). Is there anyway to make available on the web a gzip or bzip2 compressed tar archive of upcoming releases in addition to rsync? Then fink could then do curl http://someusgsurl.usgs.gov/src/isis-3.1.0.tar.bz2 This tar would just be all the sources and support files excluding the very large mission datasets. My goal with fink is to help create a complete planetary science workstation. Any person on the science team can get a Mac laptop and have as many of the mission tools as possible. This greatly reduces the load on the flightops support staff and puts more power in the hands of the science team members. I have also been trying to accomplish the same for marine geology/shipboard operations. http://schwehr.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Make Yahoo! your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs --- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595alloc_id=14396op=click ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
Re: [Fink-devel] Suggestions for a response?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: RIPEMD160 Kurt Schwehr wrote: | Hey All, | Hello. | Any suggestions on what to respond with to with this? | I was hoping to get the USGS ISIS image processing | system into fink next year. I would like to respond | to this guy in a positive way that makes him think of | fink as a good thing and not adding to his load. Any | and all suggestions welcome! | I will try to answer in his text, so you can see why I am getting at it. | The proprietary code part is a problem, but if it is | truely small, I may be able to help replace that code | for them when I next get time/funding to work on | mission software stuff. | That is indeed a problem and it would have to go or have a very clear license before we could allow it to be distributed through Fink. snip | -kurt | | | http://isis.astrogeology.usgs.gov/IsisSupport/viewtopic.php?t=472 | | Hi Kurt... | | Adding ISIS to Fink is not feasible at the moment for | the following reasons: | | | | ISIS is built entirely independant of the Fink | environment. This is a concious decision we made | because we felt the Fink overhead was significant and | unnecessary (and we still feel that way). | What overhead? What is he talking about? Fink has a self-contained installer that brings everything it needs. When they develop on the Mac they need to have the Devel tools, SDK's and the like installed anyways and that is the only significant overhead that I can see. Now about the unecessary you will have to carefully inquire what exactly he feel is uncessary. | There is some proprietary code used in ISIS, albeit a | very small number of routines, but proprietary | none-the-less. This has to go, unfortunately so, but it has to. | | The effort required to make ISIS Finkable would be in | addition to our already preferred distribution method | (rsync) and probably substantial in comparison to our | current development environment (you do realize you | are asking us to migrate development, or at least | support, of Mac ISIS to the Fink environment). | This is simply wrong. What has their distribution method to do with it? As long as there is a tarball you can even rsync it with Fink and if you cannot i am sure there could be an effort made to add this. However, why would they have to migrate their build environment to Fink? Not to mention that their distribution method is rather non-standard and that will most likely lead to a very low acceptance in the OSS community. no matter how scientific the application is. They can a) support your work or b) simply supply an info file and that file gets checked and corrected by you. I think there are _many_ small steps that could be taken to complete support. | We have 3rd party software dependancies for the Mac | that exist only in binary form. We would like to take | advantage of the availability of binary versions of | software where ever possible to minimize support. | These are, but not limited to: | | | | OpenMotif | | A package called PGPLOT | | GNU Fortran Compiler (g77) | And? Just a matter of getting those packages into stable. That should not be something that is too hard. And if they _really_ wanted to, they could supply unofficial Fink builds as binaries of those deps. | | | We have limited support staff and resources to support | ISIS, let alone support the Mac OS X platform. | | But the Fink community does not. You should make that very clear to him. We guess, right about now, 250_000 people ar eusing Fink. if only a small fraction of those uses their system they get more Mac OS X support than they ever had and most likely ever will have. | | Fink is a great tool to migrate Unix/Linux software to | the Mac platform, but the downside is that Fink | software cannot run independant of that environment. Huh? Fink has _nothing_ to do with the runtime. You should make that very clear. Of course there are some tools needed to _install_ the stuff. but if you had the necessary infrastructure you could take a Fink package and have it run without a complete Fink install. | Our goal is to provide ISIS to the widest community | possible and minimize maintainence and installation | difficulties. | | In my opinion, DarwinPorts | (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/) provides more | flexible (runs natively in the Mac environment) and | appealing (does not require the enduser to install | anything) Which we know is not entirely true either. | ISIS software development support. With this | approach, our ISIS developers can install the | necessary 3rd party software ISIS depends on and only | those software tools. We can then provide these | dependancies (i.e., shared libraries) with the ISIS | distribution. This scenario is obviously directly in | conflict with the Fink policy as you state. | | At this time, we do have a consistant development and | distribution configuration for all operating systems | we support (Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X). In my | opinion, adding Fink to this mix
Re: [Fink-devel] Suggestions for a response?
On Mar 17, 2005, at 10:58 PM, D. Höhn wrote: That is indeed a problem and it would have to go or have a very clear license before we could allow it to be distributed through Fink. True, but ISIS does not necessarily need to be distributed with the official Fink binaries. If I were a user of both Fink and ISIS, I would be happy enough just to have an ISIS.info file, which I could put in /sw/fink/10.3/local and enjoy on my own. What overhead? What is he talking about? Fink has a self-contained installer that brings everything it needs. When they develop on the Mac they need to have the Devel tools, SDK's and the like installed anyways and that is the only significant overhead that I can see. Now about the unecessary you will have to carefully inquire what exactly he feel is uncessary. I don't think he was talking about disk space overhead. He was likely referring to the extra effort involved in creating and testing a Fink .info file. | We have limited support staff and resources to support | ISIS, let alone support the Mac OS X platform. | | But the Fink community does not. You should make that very clear to him. Yes, there may be a failure to communicate here. Kurt, I think the ISIS guys assumes that you want him to do all the development and testing of the Fink packaging, when in fact all you are asking (I believe) is that he make a few tweaks that would allow the Fink community to handle the development, testing, and distribution themselves. | Fink is a great tool to migrate Unix/Linux software to | the Mac platform, but the downside is that Fink | software cannot run independant of that environment. Huh? Fink has _nothing_ to do with the runtime. You should make that very clear. Of course there are some tools needed to _install_ the stuff. but if you had the necessary infrastructure you could take a Fink package and have it run without a complete Fink install. I think what he means is that Fink is designed exclusively for Mac OS X. Thus, any effort that the ISIS people put into Fink would only benefit those who run both Mac OS X _and_ Fink, which is a small fraction of a small fraction of their total user base. | In my opinion, DarwinPorts | (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/) provides more | flexible (runs natively in the Mac environment) and | appealing (does not require the enduser to install | anything) Which we know is not entirely true either. This confuses me. Is DarwinPorts bundled with Mac OS X? Otherwise, I don't see how the end user could get away with not installing anything. all they need to do is write a little .info file. I cannot see what is so hard about it. Writing .info files is not trivial. I've written several of them, and the tricky ones can blow your entire afternoon (or more). ISIS certainly does not sound like a trivial application, so I don't blame them for not wanting to put in the effort in committing to Fink, especially considering what little benefit to them there would be. Trevor --- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_ide95alloc_id396op=click ___ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
