Introducing myself, Who needs help?

[Michael Steinfeld]

Hi, I just subscribed because I want to offer my services. I am much
better at following suit than leading the pack. You can review my
resume at
http://www.poordog.net/resume.php

I would prefer to contribute OS X related packages.. however tell me
what needs to be done and I'm on my way regardless of OS.

I have a lot of time on my hands right now being that I wont be
working for a few months. I want to take this opportunity to give back
as well as embrace my passions of Gnome.

so feel free to guide me...

--mike

[Michael A. Peters]

Post by Michael Steinfeld
Hi, I just subscribed because I want to offer my services. I am much
better at following suit than leading the pack. You can review my
resume at
http://www.poordog.net/resume.php
I would prefer to contribute OS X related packages.. however tell me
what needs to be done and I'm on my way regardless of OS.

Been awhile since I used OS X - but if you want to package for OS X, I
beg you to use Apple's PackageBuilder app (I think that's what its
called - been awhile since I used Apple) - the one that makes packages
you install through their installer.

Drag and Drop installers are nice and all that, but I saw a lot of
people who had improper ownerships because they run as admin and just
drag and drop - resulting in files owned by their user which shouldn't
be (and its dangerous as result - it eliminates the unix permission
based security that keeps stuff from writing to those files)

Also - it seems like a lot of packagers for OS X - including big $$$
commercial vendors - create installers that (pardon my french) f*** up
the permissions - like they just don't care and expect users to run that
fix-permissions script.

I've seen installers that will just chmod -R 777 /Application -
intentionally or not, I don't know - but its really a sign of
incompetence to screw up permissions when installing something.

Back when I was packaging software for OS X - the .pkg format was really
nice for multipackage stuff - I could create a .mpkg installer (I think
that was it) that contained several packages within it - that would
probably be the way to go with some gnome stuff.

But the Apple package thing is the right way - it easily installs with
correct ownership (root), lets you do pre/post scripts similar to what
rpm allows, etc. Only think I didn't like was it did not have an easy
uninstall, and no way to verify integrity of the package. That was back
in OS X 10.1 though.

But yeah - gnome packages for OS X would be sweet - at some point I'm
going to get a mac again, and I don't really trust fink - I like proper
packages.

Please note that I am in no way a representative of gnome, I just watch
the list.

[Bob Kashani]

Post by Michael Steinfeld
Hi, I just subscribed because I want to offer my services. I am much
better at following suit than leading the pack. You can review my
resume at
http://www.poordog.net/resume.php
I would prefer to contribute OS X related packages.. however tell me
what needs to be done and I'm on my way regardless of OS.

A quick way of getting started would be to grab the latest version of
GARNOME or jhbuild and see if GNOME will build on OS X. Once you iron
out the build issues then you can start down the path of creating OS X
packages.

http://cipherfunk.org/garnome/
http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/jhbuild/

A nice approach would be to try and create an easy to use script (either
a patch to one of the existing build scripts or a stand alone one) to
ease the build. This makes it much easier for people to maintain over
time. The biggest hurdle is the maintenance of the packages (bandwidth
costs/updating pkgs/etc.) But if there is a script/howto that eases this
then the next person who comes along won't have to start from scratch.

We also need help creating a RPM/DEB build system/script too. :)

Bob

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Michael, *,

Post by Michael Steinfeld
Hi, I just subscribed because I want to offer my services. I am much
better at following suit than leading the pack. You can review my
resume at
http://www.poordog.net/resume.php
I would prefer to contribute OS X related packages.. however tell me
what needs to be done and I'm on my way regardless of OS.

Unfortunately, people have different visions on how the packaging should
work - so far there has not been any agreement on guidelines, on
prerequisites.

Just have a look at
http://live.gnome.org/PackagingProject_2fPackageNames

Nobody but me has interest in clearing this out..

But I guess it would be easiest if you'd create some sort of scripting
to convert rpms to OSX-packages. (Since I guess adding "native" support
for OSX-Packages would mean lot of work (and maintainence!) for every
single package).

Having some tooling that accepts rpms or uses rpm (or only the
spec-files) to create OS-X packages would be more flexible and less
work.

Post by Michael Steinfeld
I have a lot of time on my hands right now being that I wont be
working for a few months. I want to take this opportunity to give back
as well as embrace my passions of Gnome.

Well - feel free to take your position:

Basically there are three concepts:

* create spec-files that use a whole lot of "ifdefs" to adapt to every
single distro (including different package names for one single
package, depending on distro)

* create spec-files that do not contain any specific adaptions for
specific distros (adaption is done during building, by
rpm-configuration)
-> packages are meant to be build on the user's machine or generated
by a "distro"-builder. One spec-file can result in distro-specific
packages

* create a repository of distribution-specific spec-files (e.g. one
package has multiple spec-files)


I'm in favor of the second one - but it seems I'm alone with my opinion.

ciao
Christian