Re: 3.6.0 release

[Alexander Hansen]

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On 11/24/11 2:01 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 22-Nov-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
> | On 22 November 2011 16:36, John W. Eaton <address@hidden> wrote: 
> | | > If you know of important problems that should be fixed,
> please make | > sure they are in the bug tracker and listed with a
> serverity of | > important or blocker. | | I have one. Or three.
> Binary packaging. Can we really concentrate on | making sure binary
> packaging is working on the three major platforms | before we
> announce a new release?
> 
> If we had waited for binaries for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, 
> Windows, and OS X before announcing Octave 3.4.0, then we would
> still not have a release announcement.
> 
> | It's a little frustrating to have a | new release that most users
> can't access because there are no easily | accessible binaries. It
> produces a lot of bug reports on old versions.
> 
> Yes, it is frustrating that there haven't been binary packages.
> But the Octave project doesn't control packaging for any systems.
> At least some of the GNU/Linux distributions tell us that they
> don't want us doing packaging for them and as a group, we have no
> way to do packaging for OS X or Windows, at least that I know of so
> we have to rely on volunteers.  If that should change, then how
> should it change? If we as a group are going to be distributing
> binaries, then how will we as a group build them?  I don't want to
> be in the position that we must rely on a single individual to do
> packaging in order for us to announce a release.
> 
> jwe

Hi.

As a maintainer for the Fink distribution on OS X (for Octave and
quite a few other packages), I've found that it's often easier if we
handle the distribution-specific packaging than if upstream developers
try to.  Sometimes upstreams make assumptions that aren't quite true,
and we wind up having to spend a fair amount of effort undo their
"help" to make the package actually comply with the requirements of
our distribution. :-)

Keeping the build system flexible and well-documented should help here
on two fronts:

1) Software distributions will be more likely to roll out updated
versions shortly after your releases.

2) If users are able to handle builds fairly easily, then that should
help in getting volunteers to produce standalone binaries.
- -- 
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
http://finkakh.wordpress.com/
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