Re: gEDA-user: Life and death for gEDA: portability...

[John Doty <jpd@space.mit.edu>]

Bill:

> The dependence on various packages, particularly guile and it's friends, 
>  could easily doom this whole effort.  Imagine a random IT guy in a 
> medium sized company has been asked to install gEDA on 100 Linux 
> workstations.  What does he do?  So far as I've seen, a correct response 
> on this guy's part is to panic, and perhaps put together a resume.

Hmm, installing on my student's Red Hat 7 system wasn't that hard. A few
"tar x; configure; make" operations and all was fine. I put the
gEDA-specific stuff into /usr/local to avoid conflicts. On my own
MacOSX+Fink system it was even easier, since guile 1.4 was already there.

A competent "random IT guy" ought to be able put together a CD with the
tarballs and a script to do this. There are other approaches, too (NFS and
cachefs come to mind). I think your trouble is really more with RPM than
with gEDA: the idea that a single set of libraries can satisfy all
dependencies of all applications distributed in binary doesn't work very
well in the real world.

John Doty		"You can't confuse me, that's my job."
Home: jpd@w-d.org
Work: jpd@space.mit.edu