[Mailman-Users] {Oink!!} Pig at the wedding question/diatribe

[John Dennis]

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 15:09, Stewart Dean wrote:
> I'd think it wouldn't have taken any longer to design the GNU packaging tools and process 
> to build single-binary, host-portable output.  A lot of thought has gone into Mailman...a 
> little more into in packaging would have boosted its acceptance enormously

Most open source projects, mailman included, are designed to run on wide
variety of systems, each with their own peculiar installation and
run-time behavior. In fact your desire for a GNU tool to produce a
portable binary installation is exactly what Mailman uses, it is called
"autoconf" but is more familiar to people as "configure", the script
that executes first to figure out how to make and install the package on
a given system. No, its not a GUI tool, but its not hard to use and to
be honest it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a GNU packaging
tool for a host of reasons.

Because packaging across a wide variety of systems is hard/impossible to
do in a portable manner the responsibility for producing binary packages
falls not to the open source project but rather the OS vendor. The OS
vendor knows how to produce binary packages. All this means is you want
to go to your vendor for a pre-built binary package with easy
installation, not the open source project. In the Linux domain OS vendor
equates to "distribution" (e.g. Red Hat, SuSE, gentoo, debian, etc.) For
other commercial OS's such as Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP hpux, etc. you go
to the company you bought your OS from. Or you do the installation
yourself with "./configure; make install"
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>