On Tue, 27 Jan 2004, Barry Lind wrote:
> Kris,
>
> What about people who build the install packages (i.e. rpms, debs, etc).
> What process do they follow? Do they build from source? Do they use
> prebuilt files provided on the website? What files would we expect they
> include? When jdbc was part of the base distribution these were easy
> questions; all you installed in the rpms was the jar file since the doc
> was all handled separately in it's own rpm. Now we need to figure this
> out ourselves.
Well, we will certainly have to produce a source package. My
understanding is that even for the main tree the packager doesn't
produce the documentation from source, but simply uses a provided .tar.gz
file of the html doc. This seems like a reasonable thing to do as well
(although I can't say I understand putting a compressed archive inside of
a compressed archive.) Where these actually go is up to the actual
packager.
>
> For consistency I think we need to have some packaging instructions that
> provide guidance on what an install of the jdbc driver should contain
> (clearly it needs one or more of the jar files, should also include the
> doc - in what formats though, html, pdf, etc, and probably also should
> include the example source code).
We could certainly produce a "packager's package" which contained the
prebuilt jar files and documentation. Packaging instructions are great,
but what we'll really need to do is advertise our availability to help and
be responsive to maintainers. At the moment the 7.4 rpms have bad jar
files because when Lamar went to pull the prebuilt ones, they were out of
date. He just took whatever he could find and packaged that. I've
asked him to check with the developers in the future to make sure he's got
things straight. Maybe we need to start a packager outreach program right
before the next release where we round them all up and make sure we're all
on the same page.
Kris Jurka