Packaging programs for use with Skolelinux
Hi,
I'm currently working on packaging educational programs originally made
for Dos and Windows, so that a user can just click on the icon in the
menu and have the program immediatly running inside Dosemu or Wine. I'm
currently using SUSE 9.0 myself, so I'm creating RPMs at the moment. It
seems to make sense though to be at least as much compatible as possible
with Skolelinux as it seems to be the most important Linux distribution
for education and I'm also thinking about creating DEBs or testing with
alien.
I was wondering for example what group names you use for students and
teachers and in what directories you put the applications on the system.
I'm packaging a topography program for Dos for example. It is possible
to differentiate three types of files in this program:
1. Application files (read only for everybody), this is the program itself.
2. Data files (read only for students, writeable for teachers), these
are maps that can be edited by teachers to add/remove cities, rivers, etc..
3. Result files (writeable for everybody or put inside home directory
for each student?) these are the files that contain the scores of the
students.
A package also always includes extra files such as scripts,
configuration files for Dosemu/Wine and *.desktop files for the menu of
course.
I'm using symbolic links to put the program's files in different places
as the program expects everything to be in the same directory. Thinking
about this myself, I thought it was logical to put the application files
somwhere in /usr/lib/appname/ and the data files somewhere in
/usr/share/appname/. I hadn't really thought about what to do with the
result files yet though.
I then came across Skolelinux, and figured that since many educational
applications these days are still created for Dos/Windows and there are
probably many people that are specificly packaging for Skolelinux, you
would have certain guidelines for packaging applications for Skolelinux.
I couldn't find these on the Skolelinux website though, so my question
is now: What are the standard ways for packaging applications for
Skolelinux?; What groupnames should I give the data files so teachers
can automaticly edit them for example?; How do you handle programs that
are not Linux native?; etc.
It seems to make sense for schools to package all of their old software
in a similar way for Linux, so that they can work together more easily
and integrate packages from others without problems.
Thanks a lot in advance,
Julius
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