On 05.11.2015 11:11, Josef Reidinger wrote:
Why not use osc for building it for several distributions?
That's fine for a great number of users, but some of them will always want to build their own - because of the Open Source spirit, because they think it's educational for them, or because they feel safer that way (considerably less risk for getting malware through the back door).
rake is used mainly for tarball creation and running osc, so just document that for manual creation of tarball you should run package output of `git ls-files . | grep -v \\.gitignore`
No, not document some arcane command, simply provide the command that does it. And IMHO we can only realistically provide it if that's the command we use on an everyday basis; otherwise bit rot will set in fast.
You speak about special tools, but other distros also use approach of metadata + tarball, so you think they are happy that they need to create simple f***ing tarball bunch of development libraries?
That's the same for all non-trivial software: They all need some kinds of libraries the host system has to provide. But they might even want to provide their own version (or simply an older, but maybe more stable version) of any of them. This is their choice, and again, it's the spirit of Open Source to let them make that choice. ...
And last but not least, gems and ruby is available on all distributions, can be simple installed and is well documented, so I do not see it as special obstacle.
Unless some people choose not to use that technology at all (for ideological reasons). For example, I always gave all Mono based software a wide berth. I simply didn't want it on my system. There is a psychological threshold when people don't use your software. If it delivers great value, if it's useful to the user, if it's a joy to use, people want it. If it's a PITA to build, they won't build it, even if it's the coolest and most useful software in the world. And if that affects people who want to build their own in every case (e.g., Gentoo fans), you'll loose those potential users, thus shrinking your user base for no good reason.
BTW there are projects that use cmake, scons, qmake and others, and to be honest I found ruby better scripting language then m4, cmake or qmake language.
None of m4, cmake or qmake are general purpose scripting languages. m4
is a macro processor (that was pressed into service for the Autotools),
cmake and qmake are purpose-built make tools.
Rake is a mixture. It's still kind of Ruby, but OTHO it's some kind of
build tool. It's hard to compare. Rake certainly does have its place for
Ruby development, but IMHO it's a misuse to use it for everything just
because it's there.
You know, if your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a
nail. Let's not go there. ;-)
Kind regards
--
Stefan Hundhammer