binary packages of pointless
Introduction
This document contains information relavant to those wishing to make binary packages of pointless and to those who prefer binary packages over the source distribution. The first section addresses those who wishes to be package maintainers of pointless. The following sections are devoted to notes for each binary package and are consequently relevant to those who wishes to apply the binary packages for a particular platform.
We wellcome all package maintainers. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you wish to maintain a binary distribution for your favorite platform.
- the authors of pointless
General notes for package maintainers
Pointless ships with four truetype fonts from the FreeFont (http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/) project. It is likely that these fonts are available as a package on whatever distribution you are working for. In that case we encourage you to let the pointless package depend on the freefont package, and ensure the configuration of pointless is set to prioritize the fonts from the freefont package rather than the fonts we ship with pointless. The reason for this is simply that we will most likely not upgrade the fontfiles as often as a 'real' font package.
We prefer to let the package maintainers choose the approach that they judge most suited for the task. Having said that, we still wishes to share the reviewed thoughts of Marco Presti (the debian maintainer of pointless) with the rest of you:
"I plan to construct a virtual package 'pointless', a 'pointless-core' package and a serie of pointless packages relating to each module that introduces new dependencies. The 'pointless' package will install everything (the 'pointless-core' as well as all the pointless modules). The 'pointless-core' will only install pointless and modules that does not depend on other packages. The 'pointless-core' package is the prefered package for users that don't wishes install dependencies for funcionality they won't need.
For non-debian users: A virtual package is an empty package that contains a dependence list of packages that are part of a suite: this means that if you install it, it will install all the packages indicated. For example 'gnome' is a virtual package that install all the packages needed to gnome for works."
Finally, it should be mentioned that the extra modules are pure python packages (with external dependencies) and one might thus use the prefered procedure for installaing python modules on the platform that one wishes to construct packages for. You are encouraged to consult the python distutils documentation at http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-distutils.html
debian packages of pointless
You can build a plain unofficial (stable) debian package right off the source distribution of pointless, simply by typing:
./configure ; make debian-packages
The debian-packages will then be placed in ..../pointless-VERSION/binary_packages/debian/
However, if you prefer binary packages over source packages then we strongly encourage you to use the official packages maintained by Marco Presi <presi@inwind.it>. They are in the the unstable distribution of Debian and they deal with module dependencies.
rpm packages of pointless (redhat)
You can build a plain unofficial rpm package right off the source distribution of pointless, simply by typing:
rpmbuild -ta <pointless-x.y.tar.gz>
To build an RPM package for your distribution. Or, if you want for a specific architecture, one can do:
rpmbuild -ta --target i686 <pointless-x.y.tar.gz>
The BuildRequires listed in the SPEC file located in the directory <pointless-x.y>/package/rpm/redhat/ are somewhat Red Hat specific, and maybe it's better to put it in remark so it can build on other distributions without having to specify --nodeps
However, if you prefer binary packages over source packages then we strongly encourage you to use the packages maintained by Dag Wieers <dag@wieers.com>.
freebsd packages of pointless
netbsd packages of pointless
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