[OpendTect_Developers] What is the actual state of the project?

[Bert Bril]

Hi all,


Júlio wrote:

> The installation difficulty increase is insignificant and Makeself
> is not crucial:

Of course not. And *not* having it is also not crucial IMO. We thought
it would be easier for almost everybody.


> But the better approach in Linux systems is to use distribution's
> repositories. You don't need to dispense time creating an installer for
> Linux. I don't know how hard is it, but certainly is the better approach
> to disseminate OpendTect in such systems.
[snip]
> Every Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora,
> Suse, ...) has it's own "software center", a program capable of download
> and install softwares in repositories with one click.

You cannot be serious. Do you know how many distros are out there? Life
would indeed be easy if there was just one of these centers used by
every distro. Oh and then of course all distros would have to be exactly
the same of course, or it couldn't work either. Then, we'd gladly invest
time to figure out how to make RPMs or whatever is used by the
particular distro (and ehhh ... 'easy', yes for users maybe). Have you
ever tried to make something non-trivial (and yes, OpendTect is
non-trivial) that works across all Linux distros? I mean: even the
*same* distro usually has lots of versions of packages and tools around.
And those often don't work even if the description says it should work.

Look at Skype. I have tried many times to install their SuSE package,
and it always fails on some dependent libs. Luckily, I can fall back to
their 'static' (in your eyes complex) release. That at least works. I
have used RH, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS and more and they all have
different tools, packages, versions, ... A nightmare.

So, we distribute things that are minimally dependent on distro-specific
things. We actually have ONE SINGLE package for Linux 64 bits! It works
on ALL DISTROS! Even distros that we've never even HEARD of! I don't
expect an applause (oh well maybe I do), but we spend a lot of time
figuring out how to do this, and your comments sound rather off the mark.


> There is a rumor that Microsoft will copy this feature too in Windows 8.

I rather dislike M$ Windows but at least then you'd know you'd have to
invest time only once. They have a much smaller 'distro' problem.



/Bert

-- 
-- Bert Bril / OpendTect developer at dGB
-- mailto:Bert.Bril at opendtect.org , http://opendtect.org