Survex 1.1.6 development snapshot uploaded

[Andy Waddington]

On Tuesday 2005-10-11 01:06, Olly Betts wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 11:21:31PM +0100, Andy Waddington wrote:
> > The INSTALL file for 1.1.6 says "you might want to install one of
> > the prepackaged Linux versions". Well there isn't one, so "building
> > from source is very easy ..."
> 
> No, there *ARE* prepackaged Linux versions...
> 
> For Debian:
> 
> http://www.survex.com/software/1.1.6/survex_1.1.6_i386.deb
> 
> And also for Redhat and other RPM using distributions:
> 
> http://www.survex.com/software/1.1.6/survex-1.1.6-1.src.rpm

The Debian one you cite is for i86, the RPM is a source one (I
expect there's an i86 binary too). I failed to mention that I'm
building for Sparc64.

> Yes, but you probably only have the X runtime libraries, not those
> required to actually build applications which use X.

Ah yes - should have thought of that. Would be useful if the script was
a bit more verbose and said "checking for X-devel" or "X header files"
or "X development libraries" or whatever.

> The build dependencies for Debian are:
> 
> xlibs-dev, libwxgtk2.4-dev
> 
> Also make sure you have the build-essential package installed (you'll want
> that if you're planning to build pretty much any software at all).
> 
> You also seem to need libxxf86vm-dev on Ubuntu.  I assume that's a
> difference between the X.org X server and the XFree86 one so will be
> required when Debian moves to using X.org.

OK. thanks for all that. Debian seems to still be on XFree86, but as everyone
else has moved to X.org, no doubt more development is going on there and
there is more chance that new video hardware will be supported if I move
to X.org when I need that support (as I will if I buy one of these cheapo
Sun Blade workstations).

> > so I tried
> > 
> > apt-get install wxgtk-2.6-config
> > ...
> > apt-get wxWindows
> > 
> > all of which say "Couldn't find package <whatever>"
> 
> As the error message suggests, neither of those is a package name.  I'd
> recommend installing a more user-friendly package manager (synaptic
> isn't bad) if you don't know how to use apt-* and dpkg and don't want to
> have to read the documentation.  With synaptic you'd suggest click
> "Search" and type in "wxWindows" to find the packages.

Ah, thankyou very much - I had been trying to find something that would
point me to a way to search for what package might meet a particular
requirement or contain a particular file, and hadn't found one yet.
Googling for file names mostly gets interminable technical rants in mailing
lists which provide very little useful info.

> If you're using Debian, we assume you'll just install the Survex Debian
> package we supply which will pull in the required dependencies for you.

I'd love to. But I presume you don't have Sparc hardware to build on. One
of the reasons I'm trying to do this is so that I will eventually be able to
build a binary package for Sparc (and later Solaris) and provide it for
the survex download page. As I don't seem to have time to do much
coding nowadays it's one way I can contribute back to survex...

> For those on other Linux distributions or UNIX versions, INSTALL should
> probably point out you need wxWindows/wxWidgets, though the error
> message tells you pretty clearly.  But packages are named for
> consistency within a distribution not between distributions so it's not
> easy to list what the actual packages you need are on platforms I don't
> use.

Yes, trying to guess Debian package names from knowing the equivalent
RPM has not been terribly successful ...

and ts quite probable that when I come to Solaris, I may need to build the
dependencies first ...

> Better to let people do a search in their package manager (for 
> example, use synaptic as above, or "apt-cache search wxwindows" or
> "apt-cache search wxwidgets").

Good, good, good, finding out how to do that sort of thing is very useful.

> There is a situation on Debian where you do need to know which packages
> are required, and that's if you want to build from CVS (only recommended
> for truly hardcore hackers) so that's documented on the CVS page:
> 
> http://www.survex.com/cvs.html
> 
> The list is longer, since you need the tools to generate the configure
> script etc.

I should probably read that, as I am at the stage with one of my own
packages where I should probably learn about configure scripts, since
I'll want them to compile on more than just "the most recent few
Mandrakes".

I'll go and play some more and see how I get on..

Andy