[Ifeffit] Re: debian packages

[Bruce Ravel]

Hi Carlo,

At the risk of being the obnoxious guy who's always chock-full of
ideas for work that other people can do ....

I'd like to recommend that, once you are happy with your .debs, you do
a bit more work.  Ifeffit and my codes are, as you well know, ongoing
and frequently updated projects.  The problem with any given .deb (or
.rpm or whatever) is that it is prone to fall out of date rather
quickly.  I would strongly encourage you to automate *fully* the
process of building your .debs.

Both Matt and I put our source packages in predictable places and
under predictable names.  For example, the ifeffit tarball is always
in http://cars9.uchicago.edu/ifeffit/src/ and is always called
"ifeffit-X.XXXX.tar.gz", where X.XXXX is the version number.  I do the
similar thing with the horae tarballs.

You could have a cron job that checks the web sites every night to see
if the tarballs have been updated (easy to do since the tarballs
follow well-defined naming conventions).  If they have been, then have
the cron job
 1. download the latest
 2. build the .deb from the tarball
 3. upload the new .deb to a web site
and perhaps
 4. send an short, auto-generated note to the mailing list saying that
    the new .deb is in place

I think you would appreciate having done the work of automation during
one of those weeks where someone finds a bug in my code a few hours
after I make a new release (it's happened more than once ;-), and I
make a new release the next day.

I would, unsurprisingly, make the same suggstion of anyone else out
there in ifeffit-land who wants to make, say, Red Hat .rpms or Fink
.debs or whatever.

B


-- 
 Bruce Ravel  ----------------------------------- ravel at phys.washington.edu
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