[REBOL] Re: Rebol and New Hybrid Software Model
From: btiffin:rogers at: 16-Sep-2007 22:07
Tim; You probably know most of this, may not care about the rest, but here I
go. <chatty>
groff in gnu roff, one of the first markup/typesetting languages I ever
learned and I used to think it was cool. LaTeX and Makedoc put the kibosh on
that belief system. :) Short for Run Off. If I have my history correct, it
was one of the reasons AT&T funded Unix and C in the first place. The
company was told it would help with typesetting phonebooks. Man pages are
still pretty much all still based on troff, tbl, eqn and friends. For Debian
to accept a package it requires a man page, however rudimentary.
If REBOL gets a man page it deserves more than rudimentary. The command
line options part was pretty trivial but I'd like to have a lot more sections
in any final copy. I find I usually spend about 45 seconds in the file
before finding an excuse to try and beat another level of Rainbox Six
Lockdown instead. :)
The bulk of the packaging, at least for apt, is mostly listing dependencies
and then building a 'fake' tree of where files should be placed during a real
install. The fake tree is just a view of the filesystem under a working
directory. Makes it all pretty straight forward. Then it's all paperwork
and politics after that; once again for Debian and the DFSG.
Making a package and putting in a distro can be separate issues. A REBOL
package could still be posted, just for the convenience of us alternate OS
rebol rebels. I don't know RPM that well, but have read that if the
producers get the dependencies wrong (or it ages poorly), it can hose a
working system as the package manager doesn't recursively check the
dependency tree as rigorously as APT.
After many years with Coherent (old Mark Williams Unix clone), which
actually kept QNX off my home PC (which was a hard decision as QNX is based
in Ottawa where I was living) I went to Slackware 1.0 but after the initial
install of Debian, I've never looked at any other distros with any level of
seriousness. 4.0 rocks and Debian just has what seems to me to be the
ultimate release model; no fixed schedules, release it when it's done. The
DDs argue heatedly and incessantly while flaming the crap out each other;
which in my opinion keeps out the chaff, however keen they may be to help out
with core development. </chatty>
Cheers,
Brian
On Sunday 16 September 2007 20:35, Tim Johnson wrote: