[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi...

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

Actually, afaik Radiance does not need to care so much about a growing 
community. Everyone in light sim is coming to Radiance sooner or later 
anyhow, as fas as not in need for a simple point-and-click-tool for the 
most basic tasks. Still it would leverage the job of people giving 
support, university lab admins, and also developers of 3rd party tools, 
to have a package. E.g. installing the Blender frontend for Radiance 
would automatically ask me to install the Blender and Radiance packages, 
download and configure. And all these packages could be updated without 
any trouble using package management.

>> 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 already did that, but if it's better for your ego I'll repeat it: I'm
> sorry for the rant. People who ask me to make the life for newcomers
> harder than absolutely necessary just because they're knowledgeable
> can't expect any respect from me.

Bernd, Schorsch can expect respect because he has contributed a lot to 
development, and he is certainly one of those who have worked hard to 
make beginners' lifes less hard by giving detailed help to people like 
me. He has another concept of software distribution, that's all.

>> I don't care if /usr/lib/<package> is really the right place
>> (that's your job to figure out, what eg. about /opt/?).

The problem is to distinguish between distribution packages and 
additional software. If software is part of the distribution, name 
conflicts have to be avoided. It is perfectly well to have all in 
/usr/bin than. If you install additional, isolated software (such as the 
three self-compiled Radiance installs in my /opt), this is perfectly ok 
- but not touched by the package manager.

>> 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.

It works for all the software in Debian. As said, if you need something 
not contained in the distro, you can still compile it into /opt, your 
home etc.

>> 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.

I think the typical user case for a Debian package is having the most 
recent release. This will work in hundreds of installations. You would 
still compile your own - you would simply not use the package.

>> various purposes. An install procedure that does its job right
>> would take care of that as well.

No, it is not necessary to have all releases of the software in all 
releases of the distro. The distro of 2007 will in most cases contain 
packages based on software releases of 2007 with only bug-fixes added later.

It is important here to understand the difference between buying an OS 
and installing software, or choosing a distribution which is a 
compilation of both OS and applications.

CU Lars.