Mail Archives: djgpp/2000/06/20/18:00:19
Hello.
Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel wrote:
>
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, The awesome and feared Eli Zaretskii commented
> thusly,
> > But only if package maintainers put the appropriate *.dsm files into
> > the distributions. From my experience, crafting a good .dsm file is
> > not a trivial job...
>
> This would be nice, but it is not absolutely necessary, for example
> zippo comes with several DSM's for DJGPP ports already. Surely it can
> search the package for a DSM and if it isn't found it can use one of the
> DSM's that have been included with it (zippo) quite easily?
This is true, but then it puts most of the work on us, the zippo
developers. I was hoping that the package maintainers would also help out
by writing DSMs for their packages. After all, they are more likely to
have an idea of what dependencies exist & problems that are likely to be
encountered installing/uninstalling/upgrading/downgrading. Most of the
DSMs I have written were just "quick hacks" with some major refinements
done by Laurynas.
The "standalone" DSMs that come with zippo exist for these reasons:
1. They were needed to get the project started. ;)
2. Having to re-download a package when the DSM changes is irritating. (*)
3. You might just want to browse them and look at the dependencies.
(*) I discovered that the libsocket 0.7.4 beta 4 DSMs are broken. I will
distribute new ones some time in the future.
IMO in the future I think there will be a transition from standalone DSMs
to DSMs in packages. Standalone DSMs will then still have a place - group
packages & updates - but less important.
Of course, if standalone DSMs are desirable then it may just be better to
distribute them as well, say in a "DJGPP DSMs" package (which could be
installed using zippo ;) ).
Bye,
--
Richard Dawe
[ mailto:richdawe AT bigfoot DOT com | http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ ]
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