RE: [Evolution] huge RPMs

[Christopher James Lahey <clahey helixcode com>]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Nerijus Baliunas wrote:

> So why provide libgal.a in gal devel if it is moving target?

This is actually more important when it is a moving target.  If we provide
a .a, those people who want to use it and don't want to have to update
their package when gal changes can do so.  Without, they couldn't.

> Developers really don't use rpms, they always use source.

That's simple not true.  The only reason I don't use the gal dev deb is
because I tend to do heavy development on it.  I try to use as many -dev
packages as I can.  I'm currently using debs of GConf-dev, bonobo-dev,
oaf-dev, gnome-print-dev, ORBit-dev and probably others which I'm
forgetting.

> I want either rpms or if they are big (like in this case)
> I try to make rpms from tarballs with rpm -tb xxx.tgz,
> but it is not possible with all tgzs (bad spec files, especially
> for ORBit - how do you make rpms btw?).

I know very little about making rpms.  Sorry.

> But I DO want to compile Evolution myself - that's why I need -devel
> rpms.

If you're compiling evolution from CVS, I would heavily suggest doing the
same with gal because there are frequently bug fixes to evolution which
are actually bug fixes in gal and less frequently, but occasionally, there
are interface changes that mean a new evolution will require a new gal.

Unfortunately, gtkhtml also requires gal, so I personally compile gtkhtml
from scratch as well.  Other than this, I personally try to stick to
packages as much as possible.

One thing that helps a lot in switching back and forth between packages
and source is compiling all your source to a separate directory.  I use
/opt/gnome.  This means that when you want to switch back to as many
packages as you can, you can just remove all the subdirectories of
/opt/gnome (or whatever), install your packages, and start your compiles
from scratch.  I did this twice yesterday.  (One thing is that you have to
create the directory /opt/gnome/share/aclocal (or whatever) by
hand.  There are also a number of environment variables you have to set,
but these are documented somewhere.)

Good luck with all this.
Thanks,
    Chris