Re: [Gnumed-devel] Installation

[David Grant]

Ian Haywood wrote:

> 1) Installation. 
>
> I agree, the installation experience is seriously crap. I often have 
> trouble if I get behind on updates, despite having been involved as a 
> developer for nearly 2 years.
>
> Installing from CVS has never been for the faint-hearted, for any 
> package, this is why 
> Gnumed needs to be properly packaged. Sebastian is working on windows. I 
> have promised RPMs, Andreas Tille already has .debs. I urge him again to 
> consider an apt-get'able repository, despite gnumed's low 
> functionality. With this work, gnumed installation will be automated and 
> hopefully quite easy.
>  
I had expressed interest in creating Gentoo ebuilds.  Gentoo is fairly 
simple, for simple C/C++ packages, the gentoo ebuild just by default 
grabs the source, unpacks, does ./configure, make, make install to a 
temp directory, then moves stuff from there into the users real root / 
tree.  If make install isn't good enough, you just tell it "dobin 
<binary file>", "doman <man files>", "dodoc <doc files".  It's farily 
simple.  For Python packages, it usually by default downloads a tarball, 
unpacks it, then I think it runs "python setup.py" (in case any 
compiling is necessary) and then "python install.py".  Basically most of 
the work is done in the upstream package, in the configure and make 
script for C programs, and in the python scripts for python programs.  
This is really all the RPMs, debs, ebuilds, and NSIS installer should be 
doing, calling a script (the SAME script).  Currently the debian debs 
are really confusing, it installs all the files manually, and I would 
hate to be the one to have to update that at every release.  I started 
writing a Gentoo ebuild, but I abandonned it because I felt that it 
would be too complicated and updating it would be a nightmare.  So I 
decided to try to help upstream gnumed install better and no one has yet 
explained to my fully why distutils cannot be used for the server and 
client.

> 2) Aesthetics.
>
> Most people are using wxPython on GTK 1.2, which undoubtedly looks crap.
> Moving to GTK2 allows almost infinite configurability of widget 
> appearance, borderless widgets, whatever, but this is done *outside*
> the program code, in a separate "theme" file. I am happy to write
> a "Terry theme" to whatever specifications.
>
> However, I'm also happy to move to Qt, but given the work invested in 
> wxPython, I'm inclined to the former.
>
> Ian
>
>