[GRASS5] Grass 5 new releases

[Scott W Mitchell]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, Michael Barton wrote:
...
> If it would help speed up the release to make it easier for more people
> to test 5.3, I am happy to make the OSX binaries available for
> distribution. I can explain how I configured the compilation, and could
> recompile it if something I did could cause problems for others. I'd
> probably need a bit of help in how to package up the binaries properly
> for distribution. Also, I haven't the foggiest idea of how to make the
> shell script that always seems to accompany binary distributions
...

I'm interested in helping too.  I made a binary distribution once before,
and using instructions from Markus, it created that script
"automatically", so that shouldn't be an issue.  I'll forward you an email
I have from those days in a minute.  In short, there were two ways:  (1)
follow the directions in the documentation/release_rules.txt under the
main source directory, and (2) Markus has a script that he uses to get
through all the steps in the release_rules... but unless there are new
developments, this script is not completely portable.  On the other hand,
it didn't take TOO much modification to make it work for me on my system,
and it helped make sure I was making binaries the same way as Markus.

The main "problem" with the approach is that it used statically linked
libraries which meant that the binary distribution was HUGE.  Markus
recently succeeded to get the CVS version of GRASS to compile with shared
libraries, if I recall correctly.  However, I don't have the information
on how he managed to do this.  So, much as I hesitate to bother Markus
with more requests, Markus, if you have more up to date information and/or
scripts that you could share with us from your OS X adventures, can you
pass them on so hopefully we can help keep OS X versions built without as much
intervention from you ?

Cheers,

Scott Mitchell
Carleton University