Re: thank you for the updated compat_linux, rpm2pkg,emulators/suse113*, etc.

["Pouya D. Tafti" <pouya%san-serriffe.org@localhost>]

On 15 December 2010 16:45, Brook Milligan <brook%biology.nmsu.edu@localhost> 
wrote:
> Pouya D. Tafti writes:
> Â> It might not be bad to start documenting installation instructions for
> Â> Linux apps in a wiki or something at some point. ÂWould the new wiki
> Â> be appropriate for this purpose?
>
> Would not packages in pkgsrc be the best way to do this?

Certainly; although I can see some potential problems with proprietary
software such as MATLAB and Mathematica.

Such commercial products frequently come with their own interactive
installation program, which make it possible for the user to choose
the licensed components or activate the software at the time of
installation.  It would likely be possible--with some effort--to write
custom installation scripts for at least some of these applications,
but I don't know to what extent that would be permissible under their
respective licences.

Also, in terms of distribution, proprietary software may be available
in different forms (say as an rpm at some university and as a
collection of files with an install script on an NFS server at some
other, or perhaps even especially packaged for each particular
organization), so it might turn out that the number of different
situations one would need to consider would be comparable to the
number of users of the eventual pkgsrc package (i.e. each newcomer
would have to modify the package to make it work in her particular
circumstances).  On the other hand, a list of software that is known
to work (at least partially) and documentation of the overall
procedure and known caveats could still be useful to some.

It would help to know what solutions might have been employed by other
package management systems; but I couldn't find a MATLAB package in,
say, FreeBSD's ports system or Gentoo's portage (nor in Arch Linux's
AUR).

Pouya