VMD-L Mailing List

From: Bogdan Costescu (Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De)
Date: Thu Feb 09 2006 - 11:43:52 CST

On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, John Stone wrote:

> It takes a lot of testing to determine that a build of VMD is even
> worth making available, and so one of the problems with adding
> VMware and several new linux versions is that it assumes I'll have
> time to test these additional builds,

Well, I think that I didn't make my point clear enough: in the case of
VMD, it would not only be for compiling, but also for testing against
the various (versions of) dynamic libraries. By doing a diff between
the various "ldd" outputs, you can spot mismatches (and you can even
automate this small step) to help you discard binaries before you even
attempt to run them, which would have helped in this specific case.

> I would definitely like to make it easier for people to build VMD
> from source code, so I'm willing to accept any suggestions that
> would make the source distribution much easier to use.

Well, I for one am very fond of building packages from source RPMs on
Linux; it gives repeatability for compiles _and_ installs (including
uninstalls !). If I could download source RPMs of VMD and the various
libraries and just run for each of them

"rpmbuild --rebuild package.src.rpm"

then install them all (via a yum repository for example), then I would
certainly do it. Today, I just download the binaries because it's much
more convenient to place them in a centrally available directory to
make them available to all computers; it's certainly much better than
hunting for all the dependencies (and there for specific versions!)
needed before even starting the compilation phase.

The RPM packaging would also help with the versioning. If you tested
in your environment with certain versions of Tcl, Tk, Python, etc.
then you could require these specific versions (or a >= version,
relying on backwards compatibility ;-)) for building a specific
version of the VMD RPM.

Debian users could also install the RPMs via "alien" and using
"rpmcpio" files can be extracted from the RPM and installed as a
normal tar.gz, in case you'd choose to produce only RPMs. 

-- 
Bogdan Costescu
IWR - Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fuer Wissenschaftliches Rechnen
Universitaet Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Telephone: +49 6221 54 8869, Telefax: +49 6221 54 8868
E-mail: Bogdan.Costescu_at_IWR.Uni-Heidelberg.De