[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Georg Mischler]

Bernd Zeimetz wrote:

>> (back into my cave again)
>
> Good idea.

If other package maintainers communicate in a similar style, then
I'm starting to understand why some developers chose to avoid all
contact.


> If you prefer to have a growing community Radiance must be attractive
> for new users, and as easy to use as possible.

You obviously do (or did) not know who I am, so it should not
damage your ego too much to apologize for your rudeness.


I don't care if /usr/lib/<package> is really the right place
(that's your job to figure out, what eg. about /opt/?).
But placing very specialized packages with lots of executables
and support data into one system-central bin directory simply
doesn't work for everybody and everything. I have a hard time
believing that this is the only way provided by Debian.

Among other reasons, it only would make sense for people who
don't care which version they are using, which is relatively rare
with Radiance. Those who actually work with this stuff will
easily have several different versions on their system for
various purposes. An install procedure that does its job right
would take care of that as well.

We renamed rview to rvu, because as an interactive application it
doesn't appear in scene descriptions and because conflicting with
gvim is a really bad thing to do (even if we used the name first).
But renaming genbox because of another obscure and specialized
package doesn't make sense, and would lead us on a very slippery
slope.

In my opinion, a Debian default install is not sufficient
justification to break scene descriptions. If you can't make it
work with the existing executable names, then so be it. And if
you force people to set a path to some "compatibility directory",
then you can just as well store all the binaries there.


Alternatively, *if* we start renaming executables, then we should
do a complete overhaul (eg. with release 4.0), so that after that
*all* names will be reasonably unique. There are several
possible ways to make this largely transparent, so that Radiance
would still accept the old names internally, and transpose them
to the new ones. Not fool proof for all situations, but a
possible way to soften the blow to the users. But let's not drag
things out unnecessarily by renaming two or three items every few
months, which is bound to happen if we start with just genbox
now.


-schorsch

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/