On 9/9/06, Patrick Hartling <patrick@137.org> wrote:
Having a package that's made available to the whole system or installed as part of the (Linux) distribution is definitely a step in the right direction especially for organizations/enterprises/people who want to make packages out of the applications they are building. In our case, we use Debian and we write a set of applications that are made to work with the stable banch -- we build the Boost 1.33.1 library and package it as a .deb so that we can install the binary libraries on the stable branch (which is pretty much like backporting, but we already include Asio and Spirit in the custom Boost .deb we build).
Is your packaging of Boost into a .deb package available somewhere? Or do you have recommendations on how to do it? I would like to learn more about Debian packaging, and it would be very helpful to have something I could compare to what we have been doing for Boost.
The packaging of the Boost 1.33.1 + Boost.Asio 0.3.7 + Boost.Spirit 1.8.3 we're using for our current project is not _yet_ available from the Internet. For the matter, it might take a while before we can get out a .deb out for the Debian stable banch, because the packages in that branch undergo a process. We like testing things out before releasing anything. ;) I could certainly ask the package maintainer in our team to write it down and maybe put it up in the Boost Wiki. That might take some time, but I believe he just made a few modifications to that already included debian packaging instructions/files in the Boost 1.33.1 downloadable package. You can look at how to do the debian package making in the debian site: http://debian.org/ -- I'm currently too lazy to look for the link to the actual documents. While you're at it, you might also want to try Debian out. :)
I would imagine (and would like to think) that people who develop for RedHat based systems would want to be able to roll their own binary Boost .rpm's for distribution along with their applications also distributed as .rpm's.
That is what we are doing currently, but we run into problems because our packaging of Boost is different than what Red Hat is doing. My intention with this spec file is to have it (or something similar) be included with Boost so that it is easier for people to do exactly what you are describing.
I understand your pain... I had been disappointed that the Boost 1.33 release has not yet been accepted into the Debian stable tree -- which would have made our lives a lot easier. IIRC, Boost 1.30 is the one available from the stable branch and I am more familiar with the 1.33 libraries. That being said, I'm also lucky that I have an experienced Debian and Ubuntu package maintainer in my team. ;)
I agree with David on this one, and will look forward to a Boost provided SPEC file without having to rely on the configurations of RedHat/Fedora of the Boost library.
Hope this helps!
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I think that you inverted the quoting above. It appears to me that you attributed David's argument to me and vice versa. It seems to me that you and I share a lot of goals WRT software deployment and maintenance.
Yes, my bad. I meant I agree with you. :D -- Dean Michael C. Berris C++ Software Architect Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co. web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/ email: dean@orangeandbronze.com mobile: +63 928 7291459 phone: +63 2 8943415 other: +1 408 4049532 blogs: http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com http://3w-agility.blogspot.com http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com