Re: Avoid Python!

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Han-Wen and I could not convince them that /usr is off-limits for
> third party software.  When they would not take patches from Han-Wen
> for cross compilation, we decided to drop autopackage.  As soon as

This is not completely true. I didn't take the trouble to create a patch.

Their idea of "compiling from pristine sources", which is required by 
both Debian and RPM is: download the binary release and repackage it as 
rpm/deb.  The procedure for building from source involves running 
several nonstandard shell scripts, which barf as soon as you have an 
autopackage installed somewhere.  Apparently, it's not possible to 
bootstrap autopackage without binaries, let alone cross-build it.

In fact, autopackage doesn't do any source releases anyway, either 
you're developing on CVS autopackage, or you download a binary package.

My previous dealings with the AP development team were enough not to 
pursue getting it fixed. It was a lot quicker to create our own 
shell-archives.

Also, consider  this little gem that I found in their CVS repository.

autosu-helper.c:

int
main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    char **command;
    int err;
        int shmid = -1;

        system("echo HERE! >/tmp/out");


This is a program that is responsible for getting root permissions. Go 
figure.

FWIW,  I don't know the rationale about having both UCS2 and UCS4, but I 
suspect it was necessary for compatibility with preferred storage of 
underlying platforms. As I understand it, the difference between both 
builds can be detected runtime by inspecting sys.maxunicode ,so IMO 
incompatibilities are a result of non-portable programming rather than 
incompatible ABIs

> 2.6.x is available in GUB binaries, we'll send the autopackage

(or when we release 2.8 earlier)

> developers an official goodbye notice.
>
> Jan.


--
 Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen