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The libstdc++5 dependency issues have been widely discussed
and we’d like to improve the situation by the time of the 0.5 release. Obviously we hope that XaraLX will eventually be included in
all major Linux distributions, so users can easily download and install it
using their system’s package manager. But even then there will presumably
be a delay (weeks?) each time we release a new version, before the update is widely
available via the package managers of each distribution. So we need a way for users to download XaraLX (binary, not
source) from our web site and to easily install it, along with dependencies.
Right now we don’t have many (just libstdc++5) but that’s bound to
change. From what I’ve seen so far, even if we supply deb and
rpm packages that know the dependencies, there is no simple way for users to
install those packages in a way that satisfies any dependencies. On Ubuntu for
example, I’d expect right-clicking or double clicking on a deb file to
present an install option. What else am I likely to want to do with a deb file?
But nothing useful is provided. Even Synaptic doesn’t allow installation
of a deb file that you’ve already downloaded. And there doesn’t
even seem to be a single command that will do the install job. dpkg will
install a deb file, but will only complain about dependencies rather than do
anything about them. And apt-get will auto-install dependencies, but won’t
take a deb file! Please let me know if I’m missing anything here. On Fedora it’s better because “yum localinstall”
seems to do the job, though it refuses to install rpm files that aren’t signed,
without first tweaking it’s config. One option I’m considering is providing just a shell
script that users download from us and run. It would check the system type, then
would use wget to download either an rpm or deb file as required. Then it would
use combinations of dpkg, apt-get, yum, rpm, etc. to install the package plus
dependencies. Please let me know your thoughts and any attractive options that
I’ve missed. And specifically:- - Are dpkg and apt-get likely to be present and consistent
on all debian based distributions? - What about yum on rpm based systems? - Could we rely on wget being present so we can
smart-download the appropriate package type for a system from a single script? Thanks Neil |