[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Hi Greg,

> Thanks for your reply.  I guess I'm hopelessly behind the times when it
> comes to how things are managed on Linux.  I know FreeBSD/Darwin still
> uses the old separate bin directories approach for tool sets.  Whether
> it causes problems, I'm not aware.

Either the BSD or the Linux guys like to make things different... :)
And Apple completes the chaos by using FreeBSD, adding Aqua, adding an
extra X11 and merging code from SUN :)


> As for renaming "cv," I don't think that would be a problem since hardly
> anyone uses it.  If you have other specific programs you think need
> renaming, let me know, and I'll make the changes if I can.

I'd just leave it as it is until somebody complains. I've asked Lars if
he'd be interested to package brl-cad, but he said that they'd probably
not have a problem at all to rename it.
I think brl-cad would be a good addition, I hope they find the time to
get a really good gui on top of it.

Anyway I'll add the compat directory with the next upload, so people can
add it to PATH and MANPATH if they want to and get the old environment back.

> Do you distribute a removal script with your package as well, in case
> someone decides to uninstall Radiance?  Just curious.

Well, it's a package, so you remove it like every package - using your
favorite package manager. You probably know rpm from redhat and co -
Debian is using a different (times better imho) package manager called
dpkg. There're several frontends to dpkg which handle the
retrieval/upgrade/.... of packages and tell dpkg to install/remove/...
them. Most of them are based on apt, like apt-get.
So to install radiance you run
apt-get install radiance radiance-doc radiance-materials
(if you want all packages....; there's also radiance-sse3 with optimized
binaries for modern x86_64 CPUs running a 32bit environment)
To remove radiance you could run - for example:
apt-get remove radiance radiance-doc radiance-materials

As usual there're also several ways to do this, but all of them will end
by telling dpkg to remove the packages or to purge them (a remove keeps
config files of a package, purge removes everything).

I think a look into a random Debian for beginners howto will show you
all details of the Debian package management. If you're interested just
ask, I can find a good book about Debian for you.


Cheers,

Bernd
-- 
Bernd Zeimetz
<bernd at bzed.de>                         <http://bzed.de/>