Re: [seul-edu] Educational binaries and binary directory

[jeff covey <jeff.covey@pobox.com>]

on Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 01:23:36PM -0500%, Doug Loss said:

    doug> We talked a bit about getting binaries of educational
    doug> software (ours and others) created and put in a repository
    doug> where people could easily pick them up.

seems like unnecessary work to me, and potentially of more harm than
good, because *we* would then have to be responsible for making sure
that all of the packages in our repository are up-to-date with what is 
in the distros.  since the distros are responsible for keeping their
packages as up-to-date as possible with the source, we can leave that
job to them.

all the user needs is the name of the package.  if they're using
debian, they can then just "apt-get install dvorak7min", for example,
and they'll get the latest version.  this has the added benefit that
they never have to come back to seul.org to look for new releases;
they'll always have the latest whenever they apt-get dist-upgrade.  i
don't use rpm-based systems, but i understand the same can be done
with rpmfind and --freshen.

given that, all that's needed is is a chart like this:

+-----------+-------------------------------------------------------------+
|program    |name  of  the  package  which  contains  this program in each|
|name       |                        distribution                         |
+-----------+------------+------------+----------------+------------------+
|           |   debian   |   redhat   |    mandrake    |     caldera      |
+-----------+------------+------------+----------------+------------------+
|foo        |foo         |foo2        |foo             |bar-utils         |
+-----------+------------+------------+----------------+------------------+
|bar        |bar         |            |baz             |                  |
+-----------+------------+------------+----------------+------------------+

followed by information on how the users of each distro can use the
tools to install the packages and keep them up-to-date.  this has the
added benefit that the seul staff can tell in a glance that they need
to bug redhat and caldera (or users of those distros) about packaging
bar.

    doug> I liked Ben Armstrong's idea of a listing of software
    doug> showing what packages are available for each application.
    doug> Jeff Covey, it looks to me as though Freshmeat already has
    doug> this info for each package in the database.  Would it be
    doug> possible to create a view of your entries that showed title,
    doug> RPM, DEB, tgz, homepage, and short description in a table
    doug> with blanks wherever such fields don't exist in the record?

sure, have at it:

http://freshmeat.net/backend/

:)  if you don't have anyone who has time to write a script for what
you want, let me know, and i'll put someone on it.

-- 
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| jeff covey jeff.covey@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~jeff.covey/ 410-669-4926 |
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