[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi,

being not a developer, I still want to comment on this.

Radiance has always attracted a special kind of conflicts. It was meant 
to be a program for experts, giving reliable results for simulations. So 
in many cases, it will be installed on a dedicated machine and used by a 
"dedicated user", too - someone who is using it as a professional, 
knowing all the tricks, embedding it into his scripts, workflow 
whatever, and compling it to

/simulation/light/radiance/snapshots/3.4_withBackPorts/sse3

;-) And it is perfectly working.

On the other hand, there have always been people who did unexpected 
things with Radiance, even using it only to produce nice imagines, some 
in their spare time. And the great thing about the Radiance community is 
that they all communicate, noone is blaming the other.

Now in Linux world, a lot is about cleaning up Unix traditions that were 
locking out users. The file hierarchy standard is one, the use of 
package managers another (maybe not important for those who compile once 
- but after the third update, you will apreciate the simple automatic 
update procedure). And thus, it IS important not to invent special 
directory hierarchies for every single application.

I know that there are approaches to keep packages in their own 
directory. I did so, because I often have different releases installed 
at the same system. But for a managed system, this does not make much 
sense. And even those systems having dedicated directory trees for 
packages are not really coherent - you will still find lots of 
applications in /usr/bin, there is some black magic deciding what is 
suitable for an own dir and what is not. I think it is confusing at least.

Now, I really do not see any disadvantage of renaming genbox, putting it 
into /usr/bin, and having an option (not default) to set a compatibility 
link. It would result in a cleaner setup for new users (which are the 
ones I expect to use the package most). For those who have !genbox in 
their scenes, it won't be a problem to press "Y" - they are usually 
experienced users anyway, able to edit their PATH as needed, maybe still 
prefering to compile from source (so not affected at all). So I do not 
see a real scenario where this clean-up would cause a problem.

And of course, we should not start ranting here, the community is too 
small and to precious to step on each other's feet. Schorsch has been 
both a developer and a very helpful person for people who needed help 
and asked in the community, and he certainly has a lot of real 
experience with Radiance, also as he is one of those who embedded it in 
a commercial system which is a real great working environment for 
professional users imho. Bernd is from a very different background, he 
is one of those who try to make Linux useable for the non-experts, which 
is a lot about not focussing on one app but the whole system. And I 
think we really need both here...

Ok, enough, have a nice day out there and go on with great work,

Lars.