Re: [tdf-discuss] Automatic Updates

Hi Scott,
Am Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:49:48 -0600 schrieb Scott Furry:
>  On 07/10/10 05:00 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:
> > On 2010-10-07 6:05 PM, Scott Furry wrote:
> > >   On 07/10/10 03:04 PM, Charles Marcus wrote:

> > > > Maybe what is needed is some simple communication to the major
> > > > distros to see what form would be best. I cannot imagine this
> > > > would be that difficult - they should all be able to work with
> > > > standard tarballs and do whatever is needed on their end to make it
> > > > work.
> > > Not all of them. Case in point is the person who put together the
> > > Debian packages (Nikola Yanev - great work BTW :D ). There are others
> > > out there in the community. It would be great if they (and their
> > > skills) could be be brought together allowing for a one-stop-download
> > > location of packages for the different OS distributions.
> > >
> > > This would then be considered the "upstream repository" from which
> > > the various OS distribution teams could then mirror/pull down LibO
> > > for distribution to users of that OS.

+1 This is a really good idea and some from german community were
and are still working on getting the major distro package
maintainers of OOo to one table and according to Mechtilde she had
quite some success during FrosCon or was it OOoCon?

> > I do not think that LibO should be in the business of providing
> > individual distro packages - let the distro package managers do that. It
> > will free up lots of developer resources to focus on programming, not
> > building/providing packages.

Agreed.

Most, if not all, of the major distributions build the packages
from source. Mostly because they add additional patches to either
remove functions that don't match their policies and/or are
possibly patent protected, are not 100% legal, not 100% free in the
way the distribution understands it, etc.

> The Debian distribution has over 25,000 different packages in
> their repository.
> You think Debian has the time to look after this stuff?

Yes, they do so. Rene builds every single OOo Milestone for Debian
so that he can apply or remove patches and make OOo meet the debian
guidelines.

> Especially since its staffed with volunteers around the globe?

> If somebody from the organization and/or community does not do
> the work (or DF pays someone to do it) LibO will either *never
> make into the repositories* -or- *become an extremely low
> priority* for distribution.

Were did you get this information from? Which distribution
maintainer told you this?

> > > > Okay... but for a package as large as LibreOffice, it seems to me
> > > > that a .diff approach would be much better... the only time it
> > > > wouldn't be practical is for major updates (ie, going from 2.0.1 to
> > > > 3.3)... but code the update routine to check for that and just
> > > > download the new version, uninstall the old version and install the
> > > > new version.
> > > Again...a package is supplied in a compressed archive format, albeit
> > > with a different extension.
> > <sigh>  so compress it.
> That's what the workflow of creating a deb/rpm/et al does.
> > > Debian packages are standard Unix ar archives that include two
> > > gzipped, bzipped or lzmaed tar archives: one that holds the control
> > > information and another that contains the data.
> >
> > Yes, and the deb package maintainers generally pull *the source* from
> > the source provider (in this case, the LibO repositories), then builds
> > their packages.

Right.

> > Again - let the distro package maintainers do the heavy lifting there...
> > all LibO needs to do is provide access to the source.

See my comments above.

> This is why I suggestion packaging specialists. See my comments
> about Debian above.

I read them but they aren't quite right. I maybe wrong too and in
the end only rene could really tell how he works on the Debian
LibO/OOo.

Eric

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