[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS-6.3.0RC5 Self Installer

Fri Mar 14 05:25:59 EDT 2008

Hi all,

sorry for the late, I'm really drowning in workflows...

>I don't think this is an appropriate answer.

I'm really afraid, I didn't want to give a "bad" answer! I apologise if I did something wrong!

>to just
shrug it off this way is not the way to go.

again, I'm afraid, but sometimes my *english* fails, specially on late hours, when I'm tired and not enough focused on what I'm doing... but I did'nt want to shrug it off *that* way, I just meant to say that I'm absolutely NOT an expert in the matter of licenses, software rights, and so on... so I couldn't really reply or discuss on the matter! I just execute what you suggest....

>Also, just to correct things a bit, this was discussed before, offlist:

actually, I completely missed it, sorry! probably, when I prepared the msys environment package, before to compile installer, I just thought that everything was done... I forgot that part of the mail. I apologise.

>Again, I agree with Glynn: if there is a problem let's try to fix it and
not circumvent it. Your great installer will help a lot in getting
people to install and test GRASS on windows, but if we already force
such "solutions" on them, they will not be able to correctly detect the
problem. Is there a way of just making the installer print a warning,
instead of breaking off the installation procedure.

I decided to force a "working installation" for the following reason: the aim of all this work is, obviously, to spread GRASS as most as possible, because there are a lot of Windows users out there... so, to convince them to use GRASS, we need to be sure that it will definetely work on their machines, because Windows users are not used to *test* software and report bugs... they just use it, and when it doesn't work (for many reasons, also because they didn't followed installation warnings, and they're used to) they just say: "I told you! opensource softwares are good only for listen music or let kids chat with friends! if you need it for your job, you must buy a commercial fully working release!"

This said, if you prefer to not have a *forced* installation, I'll prepare a *only warnings* one; just tell me what I have to do...

Marco

________________________________

Da: Moritz Lennert [mailto:mlennert at club.worldonline.be]
Inviato: gio 13/03/2008 11.50
A: marco.pasetti at alice.it
Cc: 'Glynn Clements'; 'Michael Barton'; grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Oggetto: Re: R: R: R: [GRASS-dev] WinGRASS-6.3.0RC5 Self Installer

On 12/03/08 21:32, Marco Pasetti wrote:
> Hi Glynn,
>
>> Please note that, if you provide binaries which are covered by the GPL, you
> must provide the corresponding source code for download *from the same
> place*. It isn't sufficient to point to the source on a different site.
>

[...]
>
> I think that this is a problem I should don't care, actually. I asked the
> list if there were problems about that and I had the green light... If you
> don't agree, I think you should discuss the matter with other persons, I
> don't have the knowledge to neither reply nor discuss it.

I don't think this is an appropriate answer. Glynn did not necessarily
mean that you are the one that has to host these files. In fact they
should be on the osgeo GRASS site next to the installer, but to just
shrug it off this way is not the way to go. Making sources available is
a fundamental element of free software.

Also, just to correct things a bit, this was discussed before, offlist:

On 29/02/08 18:02, Moritz Lennert wrote:
 > On 29/02/08 11:04, marco.pasetti at alice.it wrote:
 >
 >>  >This said, if we start to officially distribute binary packages with
 >> the
 >>  >libraries included, we also have to make the source code of all these
 >>  >libraries (and obvioiusly of GRASS) available...
 >>
 >> sorry, that's my fault... ;-) I meant only to prepare a self installer
 >> of GRASS
 >
 > Well, de facto we are already officially distributing packages, but they
 > have been declared "experimental", so maybe we can argue this as an
 > excuse. I always meant to do the work you just did and recompile
 > everything and then keep the source code. I think that if you could
 > provide the binary package plus a directory which contains all the
 > source tarballs you used and your compilation information, this would be
 > perfect. If you rather have me host these files, I can do so as well.

So, to shorten a long discussion, I just used this simple command line
to download all the source packages mentioned in your guide:

for i in `grep "source code" BuildFromSource.html | awk -F'=' '{print
$3}' | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | sort`; do wget $i; done

And I downloaded the msys, flex and bison sources manually.

Everything is available at
http://geog-pc40.ulb.ac.be/grass/wingrass/wingrass_sources/ including
the version of the GRASS sources you used (don't think this is
necessary, but just to be complete). All packages are available
individually, and there also is a wingrass_sources.tar which contains
them all.

Maybe Markus can just get the tar and put it on the download site next
to the installer ?

I hope you understand that this is an attempt to make your work even
more perfect than it already is :-)

>
>> What's the problem with spaces? If any part of GRASS can't handle spaces in
> filenames, that's a bug which should be fixed.
>
> I think that forcing users to install GRASS in a "space free" dir is, at the
> moment, the only solution to let us distribute winGRASS with a simple
> "one-touch" installation procedure.

Again, I agree with Glynn: if there is a problem let's try to fix it and
not circumvent it. Your great installer will help a lot in getting
people to install and test GRASS on windows, but if we already force
such "solutions" on them, they will not be able to correctly detect the
problem. Is there a way of just making the installer print a warning,
instead of breaking off the installation procedure.

Just looking at your building guide [2], I see that you do not do a
'make install' but copy the files directly from the dist.* dir to
$GISBASE. Actually the 'make install' step is necessary as this corrects
a series of path issues in the files for windows. This might be the
cause of your problems with spaces (although I'm only guessing - I'll
try to install my package in a directory with spaces to test). Any
specific reason why you did not want to go through the make install step ?

Moritz

[1]
- MSYS (1.0.11)
- Flex (2.5.4a-1)
- Bison (2.1)
- Zlib (1.2.3)
- Libpng (1.2.24)
- Libtiff (3.8.2)
- Xdr (4.0)
- Freetype (2.3.5)
- FFTW (3.1.2)
- PDCurses (3.3)
- PROJ.4 (4.6.0)
- GEOS (2.2.3)
- PostgreSQL (8.2.6)
- SQLite (3.5.6)
- GDAL (1.5.0) *
- Tcl/Tk (8.5.1)

[2] http://www.webalice.it/marco.pasetti/grass/BuildFromSource.html

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