Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] New package: restpose [pull request]

[Richard Boulton]

On 20 May 2012 17:48, Tony Theodore <address@hidden> wrote:
> I did a have a quick look at it, and the two dependencies (plibc, xapian) 
> seem like they could be included immediately.

Ok, good.  I've made two separate pull requests, one for each of these:

https://github.com/mxe/mxe/pull/51
https://github.com/mxe/mxe/pull/52

> Restpose itself, however, seems to be more like an application (server in 
> this case) rather than a library. In general, we wouldn't include such a 
> project in mxe. There's no fixed policy on this, but the package should be 
> aimed at developers rather than end users (also a subtle nod to smaller pull 
> requests). Sometimes, we will include an executable (i.e. GDB), but that is 
> clearly aimed at developers. This isn't related to the size of the project, 
> more that we can't produce the deliverables of any given project (though we 
> can help you get there).

Ah, interesting.  I had't realised there was such a bias.  My
immediate reaction is to be a bit disappointed that I won't just be
able to say to my users "checkout mxe, do make restpose, and copy the
exe to your desired install location", but I can see where you're
coming from, and it's fair enough.  For what it's worth, restpose is
probably only of interest to developers at present; it provides an API
that software can talk to to do indexing and search, but no user
interface.  It's comparable to a database server in this way.

I'm not quite sure how to build a useful package around restpose; for
now, my plan was just to host a zip containing the generated .exe, so
mxe provided all that I need.  I suppose I ought to figure out how to
build  a MSI package containing the exe, with supporting scripts and
all that stuff.  Do you know of any good way to build MSI installer
packages using a cross compiler (ie, not running on windows at all); I
really don't want my build system to need to run on windows at all.

To help me get my head around this, would you expect an application's
install-from-source instructions (for cross compiling) to go something
like:

 - checkout mxe
 - run "make DEPENDENCIES" (where, for restpose, this would be "make
xapian-core plibc")
 - add mxe bin directory to your path.
 - do ./configure --host=... && make
 - build packaging, if required, somehow.

> Github alerts are useless - we only recently switched over and I thought I'd 
> get an email for all activity. The rss and email feeds I had previously were 
> much more reliable - but git is liberating.

Agreed; git is great, github is pretty great, but a few things like
their email notifications seem to suck a bit.  I find I get
notifications for changes to tickets, but haven't managed to get
notifications for new tickets / pull requests to come.

-- 
Richard