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Date:Mon, 19 Apr 2004 18:26:50 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:Re: Source tree for debian build (Was Re: Status of OpenPoplog) 
From:bfulg 
Volume-ID: 


--- Aaron Sloman <A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> John Duncan (somewhere in Australia) was working on
> this last July, but I don't know what the end
 product
> was and whether he ever made it generally
accessible.

I have not seen anything, though if he's lurking
maybe he can report in.
 
> There are three packages at present [...]
> 1.  The core package linux-pc-1553.tar.gz
> 2.  A slightly larger package (about 12.9Mb) which
> includes the above, along with 'core' Birmingham
> extensions which go into sub-directories of 
> $poplocal/local
> 3.  The full bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz which includes
> the other two and a lot of other 'add-on' libraries 
> (e.g. simagent toolkit, popvision) and the new easy 
> install scripts.

I put together a very preliminary version of a Debian
installer that is effectively your item #3.  I
followed
the links on your main site to the current bham
version, walked through the install process a few
times, and recast your setup scripts to follow the
various Debian tool conventions.

Along the way I took the liberty of cleaning up a few
things that are probably not useful generically, but
help be more "standard" for Linux:

1.  Removed all csh scripts where bash scripts were
also provided.
2.  Removed scripts aimed at creating symlinks, using
Debian's package symlink tools instead.
3.  Edited down the various install scripts so that
the package installer "post-install" trigger performs
the local rebuild (generating the saved images, etc.)
4.  Linked VED, XVED, documentation, etc., into the
standard Debian menu system and help tools so they
can be accessed outside of Poplog.

This seems to generally work, though I found a few
glitches in my current version.

The ultimate goal would be to be able to grab a CVS
image of the current Poplog sources and generate new
packages via a script.

[ ... snip ... ]

> Now that I know what you are doing, if you start
> from a snapshot of the linux+pc sources in package
> 1 I could start carefully producing a series
> of tar-balls that can be un-tarred over $usepop to
> install upgrades.

I hate to create any work for you.  However, this
would be the most natural mapping for me.

Right now, the only tedious part of the current setup 
is that to be consistent with the way we do other 
packages I need to extract the various tarballs you 
distribute with your software into a single directory 
tree, which I can then bundle up into a package. I
need
to do this so various tools in the packaging system
can
examine the binaries in the directory tree to identify

required libraries, strip images (if appropriate), 
generate checksums (for later security auditing) and
so
forth.

Aside from manually extracing the files, the packaging

work mostly involves creating a series of files 
identifying pieces of Poplog of interest to outside 
programs.

For example:

1.  I register the Poplog primer HTML files with the
Debian 'dhelp' system so that a user browsing the
available documents on the system will find a link
to the Poplog primer.

2.  I provide links to the demo programs (e.g.,
the eliza start script) in the standard documentation
directory (/usr/share/doc/poplog/demos).

3.  Generated library dependency information, so the
package forces the user to install any prerequisites
needed by Poplog.

> Where have you got to now, and have you looked at
> John Duncan's poplog for debian?

He doesn't seem to have created any packages, but 
rather identified some issues with installing on
Debian.

-Brent