Re: ROOT and repositories

Dear list,

> the Gentoo guys are keeping up too.

Sebastien Fabbro and some other people are doing really nice work here. The current ~arch version is 5.26.00.

I am currently using this version on my own machine, mostly with pyroot, and I have to say I like the direction ROOT's development is taking and that I have it available inside a distribution repository almost instantly.

> 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.

I guess one big hurdle for ROOT being packaged are the bundled libraries and how hard it is for packagers to replace them with upstream version, see e.g.

   https://savannah.cern.ch/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=30944

If you wonder why distributions have problems with bundled libraries have a look at the posts by Gentoo's Diego Pettenò, e.g.

   http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2009/01/02/bundling-libraries-for-despair-and-insecurity

FYI, Gentoo applies a set of patches on top of the ROOT source tree (mostly working around forced CFLAGS or LDFLAGS). The patchset is available from the Gentoo mirrors, e.g.

   http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/gentoo/distfiles/root-5.26.00-patches-p03.tar.bz2

Having tools like ROOT's configure script and root-config available are very encouraging first steps, but if ROOT would like to be better integrated in distributions it should also try to better work with their software environments.

I am really looking forward to cling and hope its development will lead to direct improvements in upstream clang, for everyone's benefit and for the packagers' mental sanity.

Cheers,

Benjamin