Re: SDL interface thoughts

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald at phy dot cmich dot edu>]

Hi Mark,

On 17 Dec 2004, Mark A. Flacy wrote:

> Yeah, last release June 2004.  Old indeed.

I was referring to how long Slackware has been around, and not 
when the last release was. To be honest, I was pleasantly 
surprised to discover that at least 1 person was still using it. 
In my perception, the distro faded alot after the Slackware vs. 
Redhat debate of the mid-90's. Other distros such as Suse, 
Mandrake, and Debian seemed to displace it in the competition with 
Redhat.

> I'm sure that RPMs go over real well with the Debian crowd too.

Well, if there is some implication that I am RPM-centric, the 
truth is that I'm not. If you look through the list archives, you 
can find several places where I expressed a desire to find 
packagers for not only other Linux distros, but the BSD's and 
other Unixes as well. I also said that I would look into making 
debs myself, if someone could not be found to do it. As it turns 
out, the present maintainer of the Xconq 7.4.1 packages for Debian 
has volunteered to make packages for 7.5.0, once it is released. 
There was also some talk about making Gentoo ebuilds of the CVS 
snapshots that I occasionally release on Sourceforge.

The reason why Xconq has RPM packages of its prereleases is quite 
simple:
(1) I develop on a Fedora Core system; I used to develop on a 
Mandrake 8/9 system. Both distros use the Redhat package manager. 
It is a matter of convenience to release RPM packages.
(2) I have not yet had time to develop the necessary packager 
files for things such as Debian or Gentoo (or Slackware). It is on 
my list of things to do.

> As a Slackware user myself, I don't expect you to provide Slackware
> packages.  I would expect the source tar balls to be fairly straightforward
> to build, with perhaps some dependency information in the README or in the
> autoconf messages.

If "./configure --help" is a bit too concise, please let me know 
what sort of additional documentation would be nice. I think that 
'doc/INSTALL' also talks about the config options, but it hasn't 
been updated in a while.

> You may wish to look at http://asic-linux.com.mx/~izto/checkinstall/ if you
> ever were to start creating other distribution's packages for XConq.  It
> can make RPMs too, for that matter.

Thanks for the URL. I will look at it tonight.
I would still be concerned about testing the packages on the 
other distros though.

Eric

P.S. I haven't forgotten the Forth implementation that you (IIRC)  
suggested for a Xconq interpreter last year. Seeing as Xconq 
doesn't have as many developers as it could have, I've been far 
too busy with other things to give it any more consideration.