Re: GT.M .deb was RE: VistA comments
On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Smith, Todd wrote:
> You were talking about possibly 11 or more hardware architectures that
> Debian supports and needing to package for that many. I am not certain that
> will be necessary since GT.M is only GPL for x86 Linux platform.
Just for the record how these 11 architectures are supported:
A package can be tagged for the following architectures:
"all": means one package for all architectures the same package
(documentation and independend data)
"any": Has to compile on all architectures. The maintainer just
uploads the package in his "prefered" architecture. There
are so called autobuilders which notice the package in incoming
and try to autobuild the package (I think every four hours thus
you can expect the binaries ready after 24 hours for all
supported architectures.
<arch1>[,<ach1>,...]: Packages which are available only for certain
architectures for different reasons. For instance lilo is
specific for "i386" where silo works only on "sparc". They
are tagged for this architecture.
In the case of GT.M we could just tag it architecture "i386" for the
current time.
On the other hand when I talked at OSHCA (london last year) to the
lecturer of the Vista talk for the reason why only for i386 he told me
that the problem is the assembler code which is not yet ported to
Linux on other architectures. If the License ist just GPL someone
could try to adopt the code - if there are no explicite restrictions.
By the way this would suck and the lecturer (K.S. Bhaskar) told me
that this would not be the case.
> Sanchez
> Associates sells the product for OpenVMS, AIX and other platforms. AFAIK,
> no one has tried to port GT.M to any of the other Linux architectures. The
Because no one has tried this should not mean that we could try to tag it
architecture "any" and give autobuilders a trial. Normally people using
other architectures than i386 have a close eye on those autobuilder failures
and perhaps we get something ready. I think this is one additional point to
try to build Debian packages. Debian could just give something back!
> source is available, but I don't think that you would get much encouragement
> or support for Sanchez for this but I might be wrong. Sanchez is trying to
As long as they do not prevent us from doing so by broken licenses I see no
reason not to try.
> bridge a fine line between running open-source and still making a profit and
> this is the way that they have chosen to do it.
It is fine for me if they do so. Everyone wants to live and if they open
their source under GPL they did much!
> I guess that someone could
> remove the arch-dependent sections of GT.M and start porting it over, but
> that would be a large job and not one that I would attempt.
Noone expects you to do this. But we could just try and see what happens.
> My biggest fear about packaging GT.M is deciding where to install all of the
> components at. Presently, it is a tarball and you just dump it where ever.
Well, this sucks for Debian. We have our policy and we have to make GT.M
compliant. If you are not sure about some files we could discuss this
here, in private or on debian-devel.
> If we are serious about trying to package GT.M then deciding where
I would be really serious when I set it onto the Debian-Med todo list
and I would really appreciate and support any effort in this direction.
> everything needs to go is going to be important and I am not certain that I
> have a good handle on that.
Feel free to ask in detail if you are not sure about certain aspects of the
policy. I'd be happy to discuss any item which brings some advance into
packaging GT.M and later on Vista.
Kind regards
Andreas.
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