Re: [GNUnet-developers] Proposal: Make GNUnet Great Again?

[Christian Grothoff]

On 2/10/19 2:11 PM, address@hidden wrote:
> *We* have define what it should look like. *We* have to set the
> expected results. *We* have to say, this is how gnunet should
> look like. Every deriviation from what we say in the official
> installation methods is without warranty. Every good packaging
> system in an OS closely follows downstream (= us).
> We have to provide choice or document a way to build a recommended
> gnunet release. Never expect distributors to handle this properly
> on their own. It took way to long to split up TexLive, and that's
> still being done inofficial with everyone following a different
> pattern.

I agree that we should make a sound proposal for packaging, but I am
simply not under the illusion that packagers would follow it.

It would probably be ideal to have a list of binary packages,
dependencies (required, suggested) and associated list of files per
package, right?

Having such a list in our documentation would make a _lot_ of sense to
me.  Note that for this, some minimal tooling to sanity-check the list
would be good. Here I'm thinking of (1) checking with ldd whether a
binary/library in package X has all dependencies satisfied either within
the package or its required dependencies, plus (2) a GNUnet-specific
check that if I link against 'libgnunetFOO' and there is a "FOO"
service, that the gnunet-service-FOO and a 'config.d/foo.conf' is in the
package or its required dependencies.

To do that, we'd probably want some formal format for the packaging
proposal. Guile would seem a, eh, natural candidate? ;-).  I'm thinking
of something like this:

(spec
  (package ("gnunet-fs-gtk"
    (dependencies ( ("gnunet-fs" #t) ("gnunet-gtk-core" #t) )
    (files ("bin/gnunet-fs-gtk"
            "share/gnunet-gtk/gnunet-fs-gtk.glade") )
  )
)

Anyone here who'd like to script a spec validator? :-)

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