[Billiards-devel] Packaging Techne for Fedora

[Tadej Janež]

Hello Dimitris!

On Thu, 2010-01-21 at 10:36 +0200, Dimitris Papavasiliou wrote:
>  
>         BTW, I'm also Fedora packager and was thinking about packaging
>         up Techne
>         and Billiards. What do you think about this? 
> 
> I think it would be great!  There are a lot of Fedora users that are
> having trouble compiling Billiards I think mostly due to the fact that
> library packages there don't include pkg-config configuration
> information which my configuration script depends upon.  In any case
> I'll try to have 0.3.1 ready by the end of the week so when that is
> released you can package that.  There's also an upcoming new release
> of Techne with a lot of fixes but no new features as far as I remember
> but I don't know when that will be ready.  Maybe I'll wait until the
> networking code I'm working on is ready.

I finally had the time to make the Techne .rpm package for Fedora.

I uploaded my work-in-progress to http://tadej.fedorapeople.org/

Upon working on the .rpm package, I encountered the following issues
that need to be resolved:
1) Configure doesn't detect the Lua interpreter and compiler on a Fedora
system. I used the patch at
http://tadej.fedorapeople.org/techne-0.1-lua_fix.patch to fix the
problem. While the second change is obvious, I'm not sure how to
properly fix the first one. It should probably check if any of the
lua5.1 or lua exist?

2) After creating a binary .rpm package, I ran rpmlint and it gave me
the following error:
techne.i686: E: script-without-shebang /usr/bin/techne
Would it be appropriate to add a shebang to /usr/bin/techne? (How does
it run without it anyway?)

3) This is a rather non expected issue. It is currently not possible to
install Billiards in a different prefix from Techne.
E.g. I used --prefix=/usr for Techne .rpm, and
--prefix=/home/tadej/apps/home-built/ for Billiards.
I didn't notice this, because until now I always had them installed in
the same place.

When I run Billiards, I get the following error:
 billiards/defaults.lua
Hmmm, I just got this unprotected error from the Lua interpreter:
"/usr/share/techne/common/resources.lua:36: cannot open
billiards/defaults.lua: No such file or directory"
No point in prolonging this dreary existence I suppose...

Techne process' working directory is /usr/share/techne and it expects to
find billiards files in /usr/share/techne/billiards, however, they are
in a different location (~/apps/home-built/share/techne/billiards/).

I also think there is a valid use case for Techne and Billiards having
different prefixes. For example, I consider Techne as a stable
dependency for Billiards and I want to install it to a system location
via my distribution's package manager, meanwhile, I change and hack on
the Billiards code more frequently and want it installed in my home
folder.

What do you think about this?

Best regards,
Tadej

-- 
Tadej Janež <address@hidden>
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