Packaging ROOL downloads

OK, I haven’t been following these forums (fora?), so apologies if this is already being discussed somewhere else.

Anyway, the subject has been raised before, and now Steve, Ben and I are attempting to get started with migrating ROOL’s resources to package format.

Unfortunately there are a number of obstacles. Namely, we really need the cooperation of Graham Shaw in certain key areas (at one point Steve mentioned that the package format would have to be altered to accommodate the required copyright information). And we have all been completely unsuccessful in getting hold of him. He hasn’t answered emails, and a subscription request to the mailing list sent by me to the address on his website has yet to produce any results.

According to riscos.info (obviously Peter Naulls does have access to the mailing list), Alan Buckley recently produced an alternative RISC OS package manager, and the idea was mooted that we should consider that. Unfortunately that was equally unsuccessful. The link from riscos.info leads to a ‘403 Forbidden’ error page, and I can’t find Alan’s email address anywhere (and of course I can’t see his post on the mailing list because I’m not a member, yadda yadda yadda).

So there really isn’t much I can do. Does anybody have contact details for Alan or Graham? Alternatively, are either of them reading this? If so, please get in touch with ROOL ASAP so we can have a proper go at coming up with some sort of specification for ROOL packages.

Also, if anyone has any ideas or opinions they would like to share on the process of moving our ROOL downloads over to being properly packaged and controlled with a package manager, please add your comments here :)

This post seems to have been written in some degree of haste, since some of the things are not 100% correct, but could have been checked.

And we have all been completely unsuccessful in getting hold of him. He hasn’t answered emails,

His actual email is tricky to find, and he is rather busy these days, but actual at riscpkg dot org is one he may answer.

Alan Buckley recently produced an alternative RISC OS package manager

I know the summary said that (after all, it is a summary), but if you read the article:

http://www.riscos.info/index.php?title=Special:AWCforum&action=st/id70/Alan_Buckley_asks_for_feedback_on_an_alternate_package_manager

You’ll see that what he’s done is a new front end, which is the the most important (and only in most cases) part to users. This isn’t particularly relevant to what you are doing here, or the packaging at riscos.info.

The link from riscos.info leads to a ‘403 Forbidden’ error page

It does? I’m pretty sure it links to just the mailing list landing page. Naturally, you have to log in to reach the archives, but most of the salient points were made in the post. Including a link to download !Packman. Its !Help contains Alan’s email. (alan_baa at hotmail dot com). You can discuss matters on the GCCSDK mailing list too, if you like, since packaging issues will be relevant to that too, and Alan is on that. He is probably your best bet – he is most familiar with RiscPkg internals outside of Graham, and has write access to its SVN.

Also, if anyone has any ideas or opinions they would like to share on the process of moving our ROOL downloads over to being properly packaged

Definitely start with !Boot. This avoids yet to be tackled issues about things moving about, and is something that is the most constant in terms of structure over all machines. You’ll want to break it up into natural pieces.

The link from riscos.info to “http://alanb.drobe.co.uk/packman.zip” produces ‘Forbidden – You don’t have permission to access /packman.zip on this server’. This is obviously not very helpful if I am supposed to download !Packman to read its !Help file. (Yes, I just checked – it’s still forbidden.) Perhaps somebody could email it to me?

I have tried to contact Graham using the address on the personal section of his website (gdshaw at sagitta dot demon dot co dot uk). Is this out of date? What did you mean by ‘actual’ – does his email address actually begin with the word ‘actual’?

I tried to subscribe to the RiscPkg mailing list using the form on the page linked to from riscos.info. I just found a reference to a mailing list on the front page of the RiscPkg home, and sent an email according to the guidelines there – it remains to be seen whether that one will be answered.

Anyway, thank you for providing Alan’s email here – I’ll send him the experimental package I put together some time ago and try to discuss problems, improvements and technical aspects with him.

Martin Just sent you the packman zip file per your msg above. had no problems accessing it, so perhaps there is a problem at your end…

Hope this helps.

I could also easly download it. strange.

drobe.co.uk has some odd restrictions on downloads. e.g, wget cannot download (although you can change the user agent to avoid this). Yes, that is Graham’s “actual” email address.

Hi, I did some initial work on looking into this packaging, see the forum thread “RiscPkg packaging” which ended with a few questions I needed answers to before I could continue. As no one responded I assumed there really wasn’t the interest and so left it. As Peter says I’ve nothing to do with the mechanics of the packaging itself, my packman application just uses LibPkg which does all the work. LibPkg is maintained by Graham, so any changes required to the underlying way it works would need to go through him. Martin, I see I have your email – I’ll try to get time to look at your package and send you a reply at lunchtime. I would love to see this stuff packaged, so please feel free to contact me and I’ll help in anyway I can. As with most RISC OS developers, what I don’t have is a lot of time though.

Has this stalled again?

I remember from the last words on the subject that the sticking point was various bits of RiscPkg-specific information which didn’t exist, such as the long description. As the one with the most free time and least technical know-how, that sounds like a job for me – just let me know where you intend to start the packaging project. If necessary I could produce packages in advance of a proper automated system being set up, including the ‘licence’ package we discussed.

Tell me what to do and I’ll gladly help…

Where there are gaps, the general format is the Debian one, certainly for the long description. Packages created for riscos.info in fact take this from the Debian package lists and use it directly if available. These are the descriptions you see here:

http://www.riscos.info/packages/GamesDetails.html

That’s not to say all the issues are well-defined. For example, the exact categories which should be used, and other related items are stuff I’m still working on in the context of the GCCSDK autobuilder.

In short, it’s probably something you’ll need to take initiative one, and hope others follow.

I’m hoping I’m not a jinx to packaging the ROOL stuff – it seems everytime I try to share what I’ve done it all goes quiet;-( I sent Steve some programs and examples I had done that may (or may not) have been useful and haven’t heard back yet. I’ve just assumed he hasn’t had a chance to look at it yet. If my suggestion is taken up, it will need people to create a description and possibly a few other fields in a Skeleton riscpkg Control file. As this is just a simple text file anyone would be able to edit them.