That is a key distinction. Steve has produced some long overdue improvements
in the installation procedures. In particular it should be easy for
non-site-managers to install the software now.
Building is another matter, but our goal should be a standard
checkout/configure/make, together with a bug tracking system.
...David
-----Original Message-----
From: Norman Gray [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 29 August 2003 14:32
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: autoastrom in RAL
Peter and Al,
On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Alasdair Allan wrote:
> > ...of the above only (ii) or (iv) have any appeal at all. Otherwise as
> > an end user, just trying to quickly build this package, you're asking
> > far too much of me. After all there are loads of packages I can (and
> > have) just typed "./configure;make" without any of these issues having
> > to enter the process.
>
> I've kept more or less out of this one, since I'm currently busy with
> other things, but I agree with Peter. You _must_ be able just to type
> "./configure;make" without having to do anything else. Thats the entire
> point of GNU configure, its supposed to take care of this stuff for you.
> Doing anything else will continue to support our reputation having softwre
> that is "hard to install"...
Just to knock this particular red herring on the head: there's no question
here of having to do anything complicated with the distributed _tarball_
-- the problems are to do with building from within a CVS checkout.
(a) Only in the latter context is the timestamps issue a problem, and
(b) anyone working with the CVS codeset can be assumed to have a higher
tolerance for build issues than those building only the distribution.
I don't have a completely convincing reason why this is the case, but
I think it's to do with a CVS export doing different things with the
timestamps. Or something. I'm trying to understand that now.
Norman
--
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Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK [log in to unmask]
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