[Bf-committers] Static linux version, drop?

Alberto Torres kungfoobar at gmail.com
Mon May 25 11:26:36 CEST 2009


Hello,

The most popular distro out there is Ubuntu. In *Ubuntu you can click
.deb packages and gdebi appears, which is a wizard for installing them
along with needed dependencies. Probably other mainstream distros has
a similar tool. In the other hand, there are distros like Debian
(which use people like me :). Both types of distros can benefit from
simple instructions people can follow in order to add a repository and
install a package (e.g.: http://www.winehq.org/download/ ). In the
other way it makes the packaging more complex (altough it can be
automated) or relying on third parties.

Alternatively we have autoexecutable packages (e.g. autopackage).
Problem is you may need to set the execution flag or use the terminal
for executing it, so I'm not really sure about this option.

What I would do: I'd add an oficial .deb (mainly to be installed in
ubuntu with gdebi, but also for debian) and a simple manual for other
distros to uncompress and use the .tar.gz either with GUI (e.g. right
click -> "actions" -> "extract here") or from command-line.

About the static version... I've never used it, but I wouldn't just
drop it. I would try first setting up opengl by software under
different distros before deciding what to do. Probably we can ignore
propietary nvidia/ati driver users (as those will have good OGL
support), and focus on open source ones.

DiThi


2009/5/25 José Ignacio <jose.cyborg at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 2:32 AM, Nathan Letwory <jesterking at letwory.net> wrote:
>> 2009/5/25 Reuben Martin <reuben.m at gmail.com>:
>>> Asking to remove completely was probably premature. But I don't think
>>> there is much, if anything in the documentation about repositories. We
>>> have people being told by peers that Blender works better on Linux,
>>> then they immediately install Linux, download the packages from
>>> blender.org, and from there they can't figure out what to do with it
>>> and are lost.
>>>
>>> I think the noob ratio of people downloading the Linux packages from
>>> blender.org is very high, because experienced users will load it from
>>> their repository or build it from SVN.
>>
>> The simple and effective solution to that is documentation. A short
>> how-to unpack and start should suffice.
>>
>> I don't think we want to rely solely on distribution builds, since
>> they might use optimization flags we don't endorse in our official
>> builds, leading to unnecessary bug reports and wasted debugging time.
>>
>> /Nathan
>
> Not to say distribution-specific patches not sent to upstream :S i hate those...
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