<rant>
Careful, now. Top-posting used to be the norm and was only superseded
by folks who thought all prior info should be viewable and unfettered.
Inline posting, which I often engage in also violates the pure form of
bottom posting.
</rant>
Our release cycle isn't debian's, ubuntu's or gentoo's. Or RedHat's,
Mandriva's or Centos's. Nor any of the myriad others. I see no reason
at all for us to conform our releases to their schedule.
What we *do* need to work on is a repository of all the requisite
dependencies, likely an apt||yum||slack||tarball||winzip collection, and
instructions that span enough OS/distro options to make it easy to get
what you need and go on. There's no reason we should "stock" all the
stuff that belongs in the OS, like devel packages. They should be able
to get those, with a little bit of documentation.
Challenge: Do we have any professional (or aspiring) technical writers
who are willing to step forward to support this sort of thing, and some
non-developers who are savvy enough to support package builds,
dependency corralling, and repository management?
gerry
(official curmudgeon)
Rick Green wrote:
On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, KC7ZRU wrote:
Personally, and yes - I've a bit of 'tude here - I say we release on
OUR schedule. If some distro or another - no matter how popular - gets
something older due to their policies, that's not an Xastir problem.
Yeah, and I could easily get worked up over top-posting and
full-quoting, but I'd rather not ;-)
I have read many frustrated posts on the xastir and aprssig lists,
from people who actually want to run xastir, but they find the initial
step just too big to climb. Most of them are not even Linux users, much
less programmers, so the whole process of installing libraries first,
then compiling from source, is totally foreign to them. The
distributions do a great job of making Linux accessable to newbies.
Yes, the pathway by which packages like xastir get included into
distributions is convoluted and mysterious. And as Murphy might have
predicted, they seem to take random snapshots of the code at the most
inopportune moments. I think that bug of opening into a tiny window
actually existed for only a few days in CVS, but here it is the first
impression that a newbie gets of xastir, and it will continue to be for
a whole year.
There has been discussion on the list of late towards declaration of a
newer 'stable' release, so with that in mind, I thought I might be able
to help by tracing the pathway to at least one distribution, and see if
I could contribute something by shortening that path with some
hand-holding, or even learning how to build .deb packages myself. I'm
not deprecating the work of the developers, I'm just trying to get their
best work into as many appreciative hands as quickly as possible.
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX 979.862.3983
MAIL: AATLT, 3139 TAMU
Physical: 1700 Research Parkway, Suite 160,
College Station, TX 77843-3139
_______________________________________________
Xastir mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
