kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Richard A Burton" <richardaburton@...>]

On 16/08/07, Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...> wrote:

> So your snapshots would have to be coordinated with Jean-Pierre (if we
> can reach him) and other developers,

This has been a potential problem. Because of the lack of
communication we don't know when JP plans to make a release. You'll
get a big svn change notification in your mail and then you look at
his site and he's taken a cut and published it on his site. On 2
occasions now wx2.8 specific code has been checked in and released
without any opportunity for me to slip in 2.6 compatibility code, so
if you want to use 2.6 you always need release+1 day of svn updates.
Really a planned release should be announced allowing people to get
their code in and test before a cut is made. Also, it's important to
tag the release in svn when a cut is taken.

> I have no idea what goes into the "released binaries", concerning help
> files, libraries etc. You should use a prior release as an example.

The original packages that JP put on his website weren't ideal, IMHO.
They tended to contain multiple copies of binaries, installed to an
odd location, etc. This would be a good opportunity to improve them.
There is/was also a lack of single source package containing
everything needed to build a complete binary distribution. The source
bundle just contained the C++ code, not the component libraries,
documentation, etc. This meant for the debian packages I had to
reconstruct a full upstream source bundle from the actual source
bundle and bits pulled from the binary packages. Now everything is in
svn it's possible to just make an extract to produce this source
bundle.

As for how to improve the released binary packages I'd suggest having
a look at the debian packages (you don't need to have debian to do
that - http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/kicad - clicking
around in here will allow you to see the contents of each package
too). There is a common package containing component libraries, gui
translations, etc. A binary package that is platform specific. A
documentation package for each language (as some of them are fairly
large, and you normally only want one of them).

The binary/common files spilt is useful on debian where kicad is
available for at least 16 different OS/arch combinations, but if you
plan to only have a couple of different platform downloads available
you may not think it's worth the effort, however the support is
already there.

I made a number of simple improvements to the make install system so
that is it is actually possible to install the entire distribution,
selectively. This is useful for end users, but when I added it it was
with a mind to make it much easier for people like me who were making
packages for distribution, so you should find it is able to do what
you need.

Richard.