(unknown charset) Re: Amaya on GNU/Linux problems

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006, Irene Vatton wrote:

> 
> On Wednesday 04 October 2006 21:39, Leon Stringer wrote:
        [...]
> > there anything useful we can do? Test builds, debug information,
> > configuration information?
        [...]
> 
> Recently, we published a 9.52 snapshot.
> See http://wam.inrialpes.fr/software/amaya/amaya-fullsrc-9.52.tgz
> The 9.52 release is planned by end of this month.
> You could help us if you try to compile this source snapshot on your Fedora 
> Core 6 and report us bugs.

Well, I'm on Solaris9, but I've a few things to report before that becomes
important.

Firstly:

neelix hgs 30 %> md5sum amaya-fullsrc-9.52.tgz
aa4971ea7b29f29b2b57ddf95db0ebbd  amaya-fullsrc-9.52.tgz
neelix hgs 31 %>

Is this actually correct?  I usually check the values I have for this
against reputable sites to check I have the correct package.  It would
be useful to publish the md5sums on the web.  My searches didn't find
this one.

Secondly:

The tar file unpacks into several directories.  Most things distributed
as tar.gz files unpack into one directory, with the same name as the 
release, with the other directories below that.  To break that convention
is somewhat annoying, especially since it is so widespread.

Thirdly:
There should be a top level configure and INSTALL files.  There may
well be installation instructions on the web, but given this is a
browser/editor it would be a bit much to expect people to read the web
using something in order to get a browser built.  Anyway, I can't
see from looking immediately:
 * which configure to run first
 * whether amaya's configure will figure out which windows system
   to build given the my system
 * and quite what the dependency graph is for the packages as
   distributed.

Actually, a lynx --dump of http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/Autoconf.html
would be a good basis for an INSTALL or Amaya/INSTALL file,
especially since it would probably save having to maintain two sets
of documentation, one on the web, one in the archive.

Most of what I've written could be summarized as "use GNU
conventions"; and I'd suggest that given you recommend Gnu Make to
build this, and the build system is based around autoconf, then this
is not so unreasonable.

> 
> Thanks in advance
> -- 
>      Irčne.

Hope the above is taken in the constructive way it's intended :-)
        Hugh