Re: Biology packages in FreeBSD
On Tue, 24 May 2005, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:
From my emails changed with upstream author William R. Pearson <wrp@virginia.edu> (this is what he said):
I guess William allowed to quite his mail here ...
[EMAIL 1]
I am nervous about distributing FASTA with a Linux distribution, because
there is always a chance that the version of FASTA that is distributed
would have a bug, which, by the time someone installed it from the
distribution, would probably be fixed.
I guess there is a missunderstanding how Debian works. We have a very good
bug tracking system which normally keeps track of bugs. Moreover we try
to maintain so called watch files which enable automatical verification whether
there are new versions at the upstream source location to inform the author
that there is something to do. I admit that this does not affect the stable
release of Debian but only the unstable / testing tree - but were is the
difference to other users of fasta3? Do your users who download your software
regularly check for new versions? I doubt that from my normal experience and
thus you get even an advantage: Provided that the Debian maintainer works
on the new version the users of Debian get their update automagically by
updating their system (which can be done theoretical by a cron job).
I am more comfortable including a script that would automatically
download
the current version from ftp.virginia.edu/pub/fasta/fasta3.shar.Z,
and compile it.
Well, this is the BSD / Gentoo approach which might have certain
advantages. On the other hand what happens if the programm would not
compile (because of using a different architecture - Debian runs on
more than 11 architectures - or because the user has some libraries
not installed or is using an old compiler)?
Moreover what makes fasta3 so different to other programs, say apache or
firefox? They all come in precompiled packages and most people are happy
with this procedure.
Kind regards and thanks for working on fasta3
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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