[argyllcms] Re: Argyllcms 1.0.1 packaged in fedora-devel

On 2008 Jul 27, at 10:50 AM, Frederic Crozat wrote:

> And I'm  convinced shipping static  tarball for Linux is  just a
> band-aid. (I won't comment for other OS).

I  must admit  that I  don't  understand the  whole ``worship  the
source'' thing that Linux people have going on.

Yes,  distribute the  source. Make it  as easy  to get  to as  the
binaries,  at  the very  least. Read-only  access  to your  source
control repository is absolutely swell, too.

But  the  ``normal''  experience   of  the  overwhelming  majority
of  your  ``regular  folk''   end-users  should  be  binaries. Why
should  my parents  have to  compile source  to install  software,
*especially* when  drag-n-drop works like a  charm? Even if you've
got  a pointy-clicky  program that  compiles  it for  them in  the
background...why? Sheer madness.

In a  similar vein,  the days  of shared  libraries are,  I should
think, fast coming to an end  -- and none too soon! What matter if
you  ``bloat''  your application  by  a  couple megabytes  when  a
megabyte costs  a hundredth of  a penny or so? Install  a thousand
such  applications, and  the ``wasted''  disk space  still doesn't
cost you enough to  pay for a stick of gum. In  an era of terabyte
disks in  mid-level home PCs, how  could it possibly occur  to you
that a static  tarball is ``just a band-aid''? Do  you worry about
the ``wasted'' heat from the friction of the keys of your keyboard
contributing to global warming?

Apple  has  the right  idea  with  application bundles:  create  a
well-structured folder  hierarchy with everything you  need in it,
all pre-compiled and set up just  the way you want it. Include any
help  files, reference  pictures, sound  clips, complete  works of
Shakespeare  -- whatever  you like. End  users just  see a  single
icon  to  double-click on,  and  your  application Just  Works. No
dependencies,  no  extra  schtuff  to install,  no  compiling,  no
prerequisites --  just drag the  icon to your  Applications folder
(or  anywhere  else  you  like), and  it's  done. Don't  like  the
application?  Just  drag the  single icon to  the trash,  and it's
gone, period, end of story.

And Graeme  has created a truly  excellent analogue of that  for a
cross-platform command-line  suite of tools. All  I have to  do is
untar the latest version and change a soft link to point to it (so
my  $PATH  picks it  up),  and  I'm  done. No  muss, no  fuss,  no
confusion -- it Just Works.

If you want my advice for  how to include Argyll with Fedora, it's
this.  Have your main Argyll package be a binary that does nothing
but copy  Graeme's binaries (and doc  and ref files, etc.)  to the
appropriate parts of your filesystem (/usr/local/{bin,doc} I would
think). Have  a  seperate  package  that does  nothing  but  untar
Graeme's  source  tarball  to  /usr/local/src. Do  the  usual  due
dilligence to make  sure that the code that  Graeme ships compiles
to match the binaries he ships, and that there's nothing obviously
sinister or b0rked, and you're done.

Cheers,

b&

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