[64bit] Biber packaging questions

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

On 2013-06-15 07:37, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Reini Urban writes:
>> If you really want to maintain 2000+ packages do it. I don't care.
>
> Nobody suggested that all of a sudden Cygwin should come with all CPAN
> distributions pre-bundled.  My current guess, based on my own usage,
> would be on the order of 300 packages.

If that.  There are currently 81 CPAN packages in the 64-bit distro 
after Ken added biber's deps, and a few dozen more may be needed to fill 
in what was provided by perl_vendor.  Even Ports provides "only" 133 
CPAN packages to support all the software therein, so it really 
shouldn't be that big of a number in all.

>> I hope you know what happens over at debian, macports and redhat with
>> this scheme. Been there, done that.

I'm not sure to what you're referring, Reini, but this can and does work.

>> Also, our UI setup selector cannot handle that.
>
> It's easy enough to provide bundle packages and the normal user would
> never need to look at the individual distribution packages.  They could
> even be hidden if seeing those in the chooser window really is a
> problem.

We don't need bundles, and we certainly don't want to hide packages from 
users.  Even a couple hundred packages in their own category should work 
just fine.

>> At cygwin we favor cpan over cygwin packages.

According to whom?

That may work for LFS-type scenarios, but distributions can't say "oh, 
BTW, this 'biber' program you want to use needs a few dozen Perl 
libraries, go get them yourself from CPAN".  Perl modules that are 
dependencies of other packages need to be properly packaged for the 
distribution to work OOTB.

>> If the urgent need for a local patch arises the user can always cpan
>> it, until the lazy maintainer updates his package.

Patching really isn't so much the problem here; adding new modules, and 
keeping things updated is.


Yaakov