Survex 1.0.39 released

[John Pybus]

Olly Betts wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 12:30:57PM +0000, Andy Waddington wrote:
>> more supporting documentation is needed for those
>> wanting to build Survex who shouldn't have to research a whole
>> dependency tree themselves (much duplication of effort to find
>> informatrion which teh authors must already know...)
> 
> No, we really don't already know this information!
> 
> I don't run any RPM-based Linux machines, so all the information I have
> is either from guesswork and googling, or feedback from users (John
> Pybus deserves an honourable mention here).

Providing survex in SRPM form is a convenience over the tarball for 
those of us using RPM based operating systems, but doesn't do 
everything, as Andy points out.

The RPM format is used by quite a range of operating systems: RedHat, 
SuSE, Fedora, Yellow Dog and others.  While SRPM's do allow the 
specification of build dependencies these are only useful for one 
operating system; differences in package naming, versioning and vendor 
specific patches mean that the SRPM becomes tied to one OS -- an SRPM 
for Fedora Core 4 wouldn't build on SuSE 9.2 etc.  It would be too much 
effort to provide a whole set of customised SRPMS for survex, though 
that is what most of the 3rd party RPM collections do.

The equivalent to survex being packaged for Debian (at least on Fedora 
Core) if for someone to maintain it in Fedora Extras.  It would then get 
automatically built for all the Fedora versions and chip platforms. 
That wouldn't help Andy on Aurora Linux 2.0, or any other RPM-based 
distros, though, and I'm not volunteering to do it imminently either.

Cheers,

John