Tony has been driven by a desire to help this community break down some of the barriers to Linux. He is not a programmer, but has learned scripting. The build scripts and the EasyInstall scripts work, and have some nice features for novices, like the progress bars. I do not think there is much you would get out of documentation other than motivations. There are a few tricks that are not Vinux specific, that were new to me that might be explained as well. For instance, we start pipes with 'set -o pipefail ; ', so the exit status of the entire pipe can be correctly determined. We also use 'gksu' rather than 'sudo' if running a graphical program, including zenity dialogs. This prevents file permissions from becoming root as I understand it. I do not think you will have any problem understanding the scripts. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
Luke and I feel that the items performed in the build scripts should be replaced with a repository based build flow. Bill and Luke were building a special repository build flow process to accomplish this until Unity demands for the Natty release temporarily took Luke away from Vinux. One huge advantage to this immediately would be support for other languages. Due to the fact that there are Schools in Brazil, Africa, and India heavily using Vinux, this should have a high priority in my opinion. To get there, I believe all of the customizations, and EasyInstall scripts functionality should be provided from packages. Tony has already provide the capability to remove the packages in the EasyInstall scripts so they behave a little more like packages. In some cases the EasyInstall scripts might only need a meta (dummy) package to replace their functionality. It would be as simple as making the list of packages to install as the depends list. I think all of these scripts package names should start with "vinux-". However, by default, I do not think meta packages can be removed or purged without some type of postrm script. Likewise, the configuration portion of the build scripts might need to be called by a postinst and postrm scripts.
The scripts were a huge improvement over just remastering manually set configurations. Now we should take it a step further.
*Don Marang*Vinux Software Development Coordinator - vinuxproject.org <http://www.vinuxproject.org/> There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.
-- Dean Kamen On 4/9/2011 10:43 PM, Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
Don:>You are a very knowledgable programmer. I hope you will be able to contribute to Vinux! However, I have found you to be a little too confrontive on many>lists in the past.I do not know everything, nor will I claim to. I do though have a problem with people (Ken's boost spirit discussion is a great example) who will say something, switch sides, say something else, then switch sides again and say something totally different. I know some people have a lot of knowledge, but some of the things I've heard on this list are purely ludacris. I am highly oppinionated; it is one of my faults. I like to think for myself more than I'd rather just join up with whoever is jumping on the band wagon for a specific thread. More importantly though, I love to help new people or old if there is something I can help with, and I want, to the best of my abbility to give them correct information. when there's something totally off being thrown out there that might have an affect on what someone else learns, I would like to fix that. If it means standing up and calling Ken or anyone else out on whatever the big topic of the day is, I'm willing to do that.As for signing up, I would like to sort of help out before I just jump into head developer. I want to see what I can do and get a grasp on things. Right now, before any serious development takes place though, I believe some organization needs to be set out to help people wanting to help. I have asked a few times about how I could help, and the only answers I really got were "I'll let you know next week." Your to-do list was the best step in that direction. We also need things to be kind of pushed along. Not many of the topics on your list were commented on besides you and I. My other last concern was this huge build-script thing that is going on. Apparently a manual needs to be written, which just confuses me; a manual should not really have to be written unless the code being used is a library of some sort or another, in which case the library needs documentation. This is just a suit of scripts to automate certain tasks. Can you shed some light on this? This is also one of them "It'll have to wait," things, so I'm not really sure when anything will actually get done.__________View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
