[Xastir] Stable release timing?

[Gerry Creager]

<rant>
Careful, now.  Top-posting used to be the norm and was only superseded 
by folks who thought all prior info should be viewable and unfettered. 
Inline posting, which I often engage in also violates the pure form of 
bottom posting.
</rant>

Our release cycle isn't debian's, ubuntu's or gentoo's.  Or RedHat's, 
Mandriva's or Centos's.  Nor any of the myriad others.  I see no reason 
at all for us to conform our releases to their schedule.

What we *do* need to work on is a repository of all the requisite 
dependencies, likely an apt||yum||slack||tarball||winzip collection, and 
instructions that span enough OS/distro options to make it easy to get 
what you need and go on.  There's no reason we should "stock" all the 
stuff that belongs in the OS, like devel packages.  They should be able 
to get those, with a little bit of documentation.

Challenge: Do we have any professional (or aspiring) technical writers 
who are willing to step forward to support this sort of thing, and some 
non-developers who are savvy enough to support package builds, 
dependency corralling, and repository management?

gerry
(official curmudgeon)

Rick Green wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, KC7ZRU wrote:
> 
>> Personally, and yes - I've a bit of 'tude here - I say we release on 
>> OUR schedule. If some distro or another - no matter how popular - gets 
>> something older due to their policies, that's not an Xastir problem.
> Yeah, and I could easily get worked up over top-posting and 
> full-quoting, but I'd rather not ;-)
>   I have read many frustrated posts on the xastir and aprssig lists, 
> from people who actually want to run xastir, but they find the initial 
> step just too big to climb.  Most of them are not even Linux users, much 
> less programmers, so the whole process of installing libraries first, 
> then compiling from source, is totally foreign to them.  The 
> distributions do a great job of making Linux accessable to newbies.
>   Yes, the pathway by which packages like xastir get included into 
> distributions is convoluted and mysterious.  And as Murphy might have 
> predicted, they seem to take random snapshots of the code at the most 
> inopportune moments.  I think that bug of opening into a tiny window 
> actually existed for only a few days in CVS, but here it is the first 
> impression that a newbie gets of xastir, and it will continue to be for 
> a whole year.
>   There has been discussion on the list of late towards declaration of a 
> newer 'stable' release, so with that in mind, I thought I might be able 
> to help by tracing the pathway to at least one distribution, and see if 
> I could contribute something by shortening that path with some 
> hand-holding, or even learning how to build .deb packages myself.  I'm 
> not deprecating the work of the developers, I'm just trying to get their 
> best work into as many appreciative hands as quickly as possible.
> 

-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020  FAX 979.862.3983
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