On 11:06 Thu 18 Aug , Nathaniel Echols wrote:
This is yet another example of why the standalone installation approach is ideologically objectionable on modern Linux. But of course, the practical advantage gained by not having to package the software for any possible OS flavor/version users may choose outweighs the lower risks of package incompatibility and the reduced size of the packaged product.
We don't have the resources to support a more ideologically pure distribution mechanism - the installers are maintained by me and Ralf in between other projects. Also, we often depend on new features in the various dependencies that would not be immediately available through the package managers (for instance, we switched to Python 2.6 almost immediately because I needed the multiprocessing module). There are many things in the current installers that I'm unhappy with, but they don't take very much time to maintain, which is essential.
If this is something people are deeply interested in, they can write their own packages for various distributions. The main problem is that scons is a horrible "build system" (if it even merits the name) for the purposes of Linux distribution packaging. It's too customizable to behave in nonstandard ways and not modifiable on the command line, so it requires significant acrobatics to work well. Redistribution is another problem due to license issues, but that's solved easily enough by simply not redistributing the final rpm/deb/etc but only the .spec file or equivalent. -- Thanks, Donnie Donald S. Berkholz, Ph.D. Research Fellow James R. Thompson lab, Physiology & Biomedical Engineering Grazia Isaya lab, Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine Mayo Clinic ___________________ Medical Sciences 2-66 200 First Street SW Rochester, MN 55905 office: 507-538-6924 cell: 612-991-1321