[Xastir] openSUSE 10.2 CVS Success

[Curt, WE7U]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Steve Friis wrote:

> I think it is that newbee's don't understand what they really need.
> Since getting maps to be viewable requires different libraries to be
> installed, many of us think they should just install everything just in
> case. When I first tried to use Xastir, I couldn't get maps to run. Then
> someone pointed me down the road to install the libraries. Since I
> didn't understand which libraries displayed which map types, I installed
> everything I could find back then.

Sure, what you said makes sense.  I see how one might go down that
path.


> I don't see an easy way through this problem other than including more
> built-in libraries so that popular maps like the online maps just work
> out of the box. I know this would bloat the program though and this may
> not be a good thing either.

That's basically the thought process that led me to create
LSB-Xastir, which is a pre-compiled binary which gives you as much
capability as I could get linked in statically.  It should run on
ANY Linux system that is LSB-3.0 compliant.  Getting LSB compliance
on your system is usually as easy as adding an "LSB" package using
whatever package manager your system provides.

The downside to LSB-Xastir is that everything gets relocated to the
"/opt/Xastir" instead of "/usr/local/share/xastir".  If you've
already run another non-LSB Xastir binary, you'll need to relocate
or link some stuff between the two, and probably delete your
~/.xastir directory so that everything starts clean.

The upside is that you don't need to compile, plus new versions come
out about twice a month, nearly keeping up with CVS.

As far as including libraries in the main distribution, we
peridocially have "discussions" about this.  I had to fight hard to
get Shapelib added.  Generally it's not a good idea to add libraries
in this manner, as then we have more maintenance trying to keep up
with their releases and updating our sources to match.  In this case
and a few others, the benefits outweighed the downsides.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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