[Bf-committers] Static linux version, drop?

[Alberto Torres]

2009/5/26 Ken Hughes <khughes at pacific.edu>:
> * With so any linux distros out there, I don't see a practical solution
> for supporting their individual package managers.  We would need (at the
> least) .deb and .rpm packages in addition to the tar.bz2 files.   But
> should we do this, we'll be "competing" with the packages users can
> download directly for their distro and so to install blender from our
> site they would need to uninstall blender that comes with their distro,
> and if they later encounter a bug it's going to be confusing trying to
> track its cause.  We would end up telling users to download and install
> our tar.bz2 file to find the problem.

Altough there are a lot of distros, most linux noobs (which are the
ones that don't know how to use the tar.gz) use Ubuntu or any variant
of it. As I said earlier, Ubuntu comes with gdebi, which pops out when
the user double-clicks the .deb file and installs any needed
dependency. It also replaces any previous version.

The only modificacion of the blender package in ubuntu I'm aware of is
a wrapper script which checks at startup if the ~/.blender/scripts
directory is up-to-date and copies or links the scripts to that folder
if needed.

Replying to Cambell: Yes, I'm interested in making .deb packages. I'm
not very experienced but I've done .deb packages in the past.