Re: ROOT and repositories

Hello,

On 29 March 2010 10:33, Fons Rademakers <Fons.Rademakers_at_cern.ch> wrote:
> Hi Thiemo,
>
>  Christian did a humongous amount of work to package ROOT for Debian, with
> the package files nicely spread out all over the system as the Debian folks
> like it (just look at the incredible amount of scripts and packaging
> snippets in root/build/package/debian). We went to tremendous auditing, and
> solved all real and perceived licensing issues, to make sure ROOT is really
> "Open Source" and could be accepted by the Debann high priests. And still
> all we got in return was the distribution is debian-experimental, or
> something like that, of some old out-of-date ROOT version, causing us, and
> our users, more problems than benefits.

the Gentoo guys are keeping up too. Often root is marked as ~arch (unstable) but I think this is mainly due to the fact that there are fewer gentoo users and even fewer gentoo users who use root so it takes a while to get marked stable. But unstable things rarely deter gentoo users ;))

I have to say I prefer portage taking care of things over any configure scripts or other package specific things. For one package it is simple to compile it myself, and take care of the peculiarities of that package but this approach doesn't scale to many packages (and most people have many packages).

So I am strongly in favour of making root as "easy to package" as possible (and then it still is a huge amount of work to package it). It is a lot of work on both sides but well worth it, it makes life sooo much easier for end users.

Tim

-- 
http://tim.jottit.com/