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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 01/21/2014 12:40 PM, Fons Adriaensen
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:20140121124023.GA32168@linuxaudio.org"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 05:55:04AM +0000, Filipe Coelho wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I think we should stop assuming releasing source code is enough.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Enough for what ? Users who don't want to install from source
want packages made for the package manager of their distro,
which will take care of dependencies etc. You can't expcect a
developer to provide such packages for each and every distro.
I don't even provide them for the distro I use myself.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Enough for most users to install your software.<br>
See my next point.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20140121124023.GA32168@linuxaudio.org"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">and most users are not able to compile software,
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
They can learn to do it. It's not rocket science.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I think it's not up to the users to understand how software
compilation works.<br>
Car drivers don't need to understand how a car engine works. It
helps sometimes, but that's usually a task for the mechanic.<br>
<br>
Some distributions are making compilation specially hard.<br>
Most source tarballs install to /usr/local, but in Debian (and maybe
others) that dir is not considered by pkg-config.<br>
Example: building stuff like NTK and then NON will result in an
error (NTK is a dependency of NON apps). Although NTK was installed
before, users need to manually setup PKG_CONFIG_PATH for NON
software to see it...<br>
<br>
I seriously don't wish any new user to have to put up with this.<br>
It might be easy for us that are now used to this sort of things,
but not for them.<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20140121124023.GA32168@linuxaudio.org"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">plus some distributions make it specially hard (debian, ubuntu,
fedora, opensuse) by having the libs installed but not the headers.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
They all provide 'devel' packages as well. Why they split things
up is another question, IMHO it's a silly thing to do. Usually
the space taken by the headers is small fraction of the total.</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
It's not always easy to figure out the header package files. (like
ALSA = libasound2-dev)<br>
Also in Debian installing libjack-dev changes your current JACK
version from jack2 to jack1. We need to install libjack-jackd2-dev
instead... :S<br>
<br>
<blockquote cite="mid:20140121124023.GA32168@linuxaudio.org"
type="cite">
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Now, I have a "toolchain" repository for ubuntu 10.04 with gcc4.8,
python3+qt4 and a bunch of other useful stuff.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Unless that toolchain can magically create packages for all major
distros (and I'm pretty sure it can't do that), what's the point ?</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
It won't create packages, it will create binaries - which is what
users are looking for.<br>
<br>
Take a look at what happened to the recent release of
deteriorate-lv2.<br>
Author released only source code, so users have to compile in order
to use it.<br>
But due to a variety of reasons it's failing for some of them. Those
users will simply skip the software and not use it, because well,
they can't...<br>
<br>
If there was binaries, users could try that first.<br>
Commercial software always releases binaries (they have to anyway),
and I don't see the users complaining much about those.<br>
When done right, binaries can cover most Linux users, which will be
happy to be using software instead of trying to figure out
dependencies, paths, headers, etc etc.<br>
<br>
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