Re: [Pkg-grass-general] GRASS uploaded

[Hamish <hamish_nospam@yahoo.com>]

> > > The grass package has been uploaded to the main archive as
> > > grass_5.7.0 +6.0.0beta2-1. Hooray!

Nice work Steve (+ everyone else). I'm really pleasantly surprised how
useful & productive this mailing list has been over the last few months.


> > > However, since it provides new binary packages it has to go
> > > through the NEW queue[1]. This has gotten very long and the
> > > release managers don't seem inclined to give grass any special
> > > consideration :'( But there is still hope it will make it for
> > > Sarge.

time to sit back and have a beer I guess.


> > Is it single-arch as in the past? I think it has never been compiled
> > on non-i386 'til now. 
>
> On the advice of my sponsor I've requested grass be removed from the
> Packages-arch-specific file. He managed to compile it on alpha and
> Jason E. Stewart managed to compile it on powerpc(although with some
> tcl/tk trouble? More info on that would be nice).

GRASS "should" successfully compile on pretty much everything.
Certainly people are using it on i386, amd64, PPc/ibmG5, SGI, Sun, & ARM
hardware that I know of. If it doesn't work on any of the Debain
platforms (and it is GRASS's fault, not a dependency's) then it is a bug
we should fix upstream. Care has been taken to keep things platform
agnostic so I'd be hopeful.


> BTW, is there some way I can see the contents of the arch-specific
> file? I was not aware of its existence until now.

%grass: i386
  # maintainer still figuring out packaging, HUGE, and static linking
only atm

Note that all refers to problems with 5.0.3. With shared libraries the
package is now much smaller & compiles faster; 5.4+ uses symlinks not
hard links now; & packaging seems to be well under control at this
point. It's still a big package to compile on the more ancient platforms
& thus a bit of a strain on the build system, but I don't think we are
going to be uploading new packages every two weeks.



good on ya,
Hamish