[Chicken-hackers] binary distros

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John Cowan wrote:

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

  

This is getting way too confusing.  In fact, while in the shower, I 
decided it's time to edit all the READMEs to reflect one consistent 
message.  And all the wiki pages, and also have little blurbs every time 
someone runs ./configure.  
    

Excellent.

  

- CMake is the canonical method by which Chicken DISTRIBUTIONS are 
created.  If you want to modify the canonical distro, you have to work 
with CMake.
    

*Source* distributions, that is.  Binary distributions can still be
built either way, unless they are based on MSVC.
  

Chicken itself does not have "binary distros."  There's no code in Darcs to generate such distros.  In general, we don't have the capability, because we hardwire paths into chicken-config.h at compile time.  We recently nuked the Windows binary distro because of this issue.  It hardwired the installation to C:\Program Files\Chicken, and that is not deemed culturally acceptable on Windows.  It would make Chicken look bad, whereas when people use the supported CMake source build, Chicken looks good.

What we do have, is people informally cobbling up their own distros for Debian, Ubuntu, Cygwin, etc.  Generally speaking, I have no idea who these people are, or what they are up to.  I don't know how their code works, and I can't replicate what they do.  I can't guarantee that they actually distributed everything they're supposed to.  Their installation paths are whatever they've chosen, and they can't be changed.  I take it this is acceptable in Unix packaging culture.  It bears remembrance that Windows does not have a packaging culture, with canonical installation directories and whatnot.  It has an installation binary culture, where the user always gets to specify the path they want the app installed to.

Moving forwards, I'd like to see these various Linux distro builds formally supported.  With CMake as the toplevel build tool driving the distro creation.  Ivan's Debian stuff will be the 1st one to be integrated.  If there are other Linux or Cygwin packaging people out there, please send me e-mail.

We'll need some new build target nomenclature.  "make dist" should just make a source tarball.  "make debian" would make a Debian binary package.  Or some such.  Haven't thought this through yet.

John, do you know anything about Cygwin packaging methods?  An advantage of working on Cygwin, is I can help you with it and test it.  Good for figuring out The Right Way To Do Things.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every