[redland-dev] Re: Questions about the maintenance of librdf binary Packages

[Dave Beckett]

Eyal Oren wrote on 4th October:
> On 10/03/06/10/06 17:30 +0100, Benjamin Heitmann wrote:
>> Hello Dave, and hello to the Redland-Dev mailing list.
>>
>> I have a few questions regarding the current state of the maintenance
>> of binary packages for redland.
>>
>> Since a lot of the changes between redland versions are not added
>> features but fixes for bugs with a high impact, it would be really
>> good if the ability to benefit from the fixes would also exist for
>> linux distributions which are not unstable or beta, but which are used
>> by real end users.
>
> just to make Benjamin's point maybe a bit more clear, some of us
> (developing ActiveRDF) are using Ubuntu dapper (current stable Ubuntu
> version), but the last version in the dapper repositories is
> 1.0.2-2ubuntu5 (for librdf0) while the dapper repository on librdf.org
> is empty.
> Installing either the edgy version (1.0.4-1) or the debian unstable
> version is not possible without breaking stuff, since they are compiled
> against (and depend on) newer versions of libc6 than those used in dapper.
> 
> Some bugs have been fixed between 1.0.2 and 1.0.4 (notably in the ruby
> bindings) that we depend on, but we cannot use stock Redland packages
> since they don't contain those fixes. And if we distribute our work, we
> don't know what redland version to depend on and what we should
> recommend our users.
> 
> Dave, I understand that you are busy, so any help or wise words would
> already be appreciated.

I don't use ubuntu on any system but do have xen virtual machines for
several of them and can build packages, however me doing all the
packaging and binary building is not a scalable process, as you
can imagine.  My suggestion is that you learn how to do backports,
as it's relatively straightforward when you get into it.


Benjamin also asked:
> If there are currently no plans to change the way in which librdf binary
> releases are made, then let me ask this question:
>
> Is it technically possible to distribute the ruby bindings as a gem ?

I guess it's possible.  I'd want somebody to take ownership of making
that happen as I'm not going to do it.  I could do a hand-off package
of just the redland ruby binding on it's own.

  [ this is part of a bigger possibility - I'd like to split up
    all the bindings into individual packages with their own maintainers
    if that worked
  ]

> Mongrel compiles a few c files every time its gem is installed, and
> distributes a gem with binary files for its windows users.
>
> But in order to compile the redland ruby libraries a wide range of
> libraries is necessary, from crypto libs, libraptor and librasqal to
> mysql libs. Also the SWIG process is involved in making the c files of
> librdf-ruby in the first place.

SWIG isn't needed if the Redland.i file is newer than the bindings
that are generated.

> Having the newest version of redland et al available for every linux
> distribution would really benefit the development and speed of
> adaptation of semantic web applikation development in general, and
> Active RDF deployment in particular :)
>
> sincerely, Benjamin Heitmann.

I see you have since this email got Active RDF 1.0 out - congrats -
so maybe you took a different route?

Dave