Re: [Texmacs-dev] Auto-update system

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 05:32:00PM +0200, Miguel de Benito Delgado wrote:
> On 17 Oct, 2013, at 14:56, François Poulain <address@hidden> wrote:
> > For GNU/Linux and others free unices, you should leaves this work to
> > package managers.

I agree for people who want to stick to the official packages of their 
favourite distribution.

> But package managers don't update their packages that often, especially for 
> some distros like Debian, I think.

Yes, so people who want to have the latest version under Linux may want to
have a way to use a generic package based on a binary tarball instead,
which will be updated by ourselves as soon as a new version comes out.

Notice also that I am not sure that TeXmacs is equally well maintained on
the dozens of Linux distributions out there.

> Furthermore, Joris mentioned that he wanted to be distributing binary 
> tarballs only,
> I guess that in order to keep dependency management simple?

Yes, that is what we have always done: a generic static binary package.
Currently, it is based on the X11 version, but I would like to switch to
the Qt version, and have some kind of automatic upgrade system working,
if that is not too hard.

> A similar effect can be achieved by providing our own repo and telling the 
> user with a popup that "A new version is available, please open your package 
> manager to update". I guess even this popup would be unnecessary with most 
> distros because they automatically check the repositories.

Then we are again stuck with a non trivial number of dependencies
on the existing package managers.
 
> To recap: the (possible) problem is that not all distributions update that 
> often.

Yes, this is true, unfortunately.

> IF this is true, THEN we want our own update system.
> Why not provide our own mini-repo and rpms (with every library bundled if 
> need be) instead?

With a static binary tarball, one depends on no external programs at all.
Just decompress at some standard location and you are set.

Best wishes, --Joris