Re: RPM for gnome-libs 1.0.54?

[Raul Acevedo <raul cantara com>]

Keith Wright wrote:

 > If you want real simple, what's wrong with (./configure; make)?

If you are installing from tarballs exclusively, nothing.

If you are installing even partially from RPMs, that doesn't work.

Unfortunately, RedHat decided long ago that RPMs would put things in places
different than a standard tarball install would.  So, doing the above
simply does not work if you have installed things from RPM.  It is a royal
pain, a very bad decision, and one of the main problems with RPM.  But
that's the way it is.

 > That command doesn't work on _any_ tarball, just on one that contains a
 > tar'ed and gzip'ed RPM spec file.  Somebody has to make that spec file.

Understood.  It was implied that under GNOME, the tarballs include the spec
file.  Is this true for all the standard GNOME packages?

 > This is just an RPM command with the build-from-zip'ed option.  It's not
 > up to the Gnome programmers to document rpm.  Start with 'man rpm', if
 > that doesn't do it RedHat sells a book called 'Maximum RPM'.

Wrong. 

Looking up "man rpm" assumes I know I want rpm to do something.

Tarballs vary wildly, containing everything from a simple Makefile to a
whole autoconf setup.  It would never occur to me that rpm could be smart
enough to `figure out' whatever is inside a tarball and magically make RPMs
out of it, because to me this seems intractable.

Ah, but people put spec files in the tarballs to help it out!

Such knowledge is a mystical magic secret because it is not well
publicized.  If it is not well publicized, it might as well not exist.  All
you gung ho programmers out there please reread that 20 or 30 times, write
it on your foreheads, and make it popup on your computers every half hour. 

Ah, but if you had fully read all 13+ pages of "man rpm", or the 450 pages
of "Maximum RPM", you would know this!

The beauty of rpm is its simplicity, which means I haven't had to read all
13+ pages of its man page, or a whole book, to know how to use it.  THIS IS
HOW IT SHOULD BE.  Again, if tarballs->RPMs were a semi-obvious thing, then
maybe I should have looked into it.  But it never even remotely occurred to
me because that seems impossible.  The magic about spec files and
programmers putting them in there is just that, magic, unless it is made
public.

Finally, it is really annoying and incomprehensible to me that people STILL
have this attitude "programmer's shouldn't document, users should RTFM".
Yes, to some degree this is true, and I've many a times told people,
including myself, to RTFM.  BUT THIS ATTITUDE IS WHY GNOME IS NECESSARY IN
THE FIRST PLACE.  GNOME is necessary for Linux and Unix because this
attitude made them hard to use.  It is this attitude that hinders more
widespread acceptance of them. 

I can understand that programmers don't want to spend much time on stuff
like this.  They don't necessarily have to.  I don't care who does it.  The
GNOME project, as an entity, has to find people to do these things.  It has
organizers whose job is to oversee these details.  To simply say "well the
programmers don't want to do it, so some random volunteer just has to", is
wrong.  There has to be an effort to make certain things happen, whether
it's by programmers, or the people that do documentation, or the people
that write up the web sites, or come up with spec files, or whatever.

My apologies for being so negative.  I love Linux.  I love GNOME.  Believe
it or not, I think everyone on the project does an amazing job.  It pains
me to complain so much about this.  But I only do it because it needs to be
said to make the project better, for the benefit of everyone.

Raul