Comments on: MySQL Toolkit released as one package

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:04:02 +0000

Sven: thank you. I will include the spec file in the tarball and upload your RPMs. (I don’t mind your name being in them).

By: Sven Edge

Sven Edge — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:03:11 +0000

I’ve been looking at RPM-ing Elgg recently, and I thought I’d have a go at packaging this. After cribbing the spec file from another perl app that installs stuff in /usr/bin, perl-libwww-perl, it turned out to be quite easy (assuming I’ve not done something stupid). Results are here: http://www.alia.org.uk/~sven/rpm/

The packages have my/Curverider’s name on them, so you’ll probably want to rebuild them if you have an RPM-based system available. :)

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 02:09:08 +0000

The sourceforge.net documentation system is really clunky in my opinion. I have started to flesh out documentation on the project website, but I’m short on time and long on TODO lists…

I added a brief document on the sourceforge docs page that just says “look at the project homepage” but I found it even hard to find and view the doc I just created!

By: Sheeri

Sheeri — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 23:07:12 +0000

Is there a page somewhere where someone who hasn’t followed your blog from day 1 can figure out what all these programs do? The docs page on sourceforge was empty….

By: Xaprb

Xaprb — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:10:39 +0000

Yeah, I think the problem is not that I don’t know make, after reading it more (the GNU make manual for example). I still have a lot to learn about it. But I have learned enough now to have the opinion that it’s not the right tool for building a package like this, where I’m choosing the latest tagged version of each individual package and wrapping them all up.

I also think there’s a lot to be said for the folks who are trying to get away from MakeMaker for Perl packaging and distribution. To do more complex things you need to resort to shell scripting. What could be less portable, and how silly does that seem, when you obviously have an incredibly powerful and portable language available on the system? Perl, that is.

The MakeMaker approach will never work on Windows and all the other esoteric systems Perl is ported to. I’ll leave it this way for right now, but maybe I’ll figure something better out later.