[571] in athena10
Re: Could an arch/i386_deb40/bin be created in the gnu locker for Athena 10.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Thu Oct 16 11:15:47 2008
From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@MIT.EDU>
To: gnu@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <5409CAB2-51C1-479C-9A85-E8416EC87B36@mit.edu>
Message-Id: <967133FC-8545-4842-89B9-62C137F14D7F@mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 11:15:01 -0400
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
Bill and I talked about this a little yesterday. What came out of it
is:
* No one else seems to care. Not that I care all that much either...
* This is GNU software we're supplying, and Ubuntu is loaded with lots
of GNU software already, so what's the point?
* Apparently the recommended approach for third-party software lockers
for Athena 10 will be to create empty directories in AFS and recommend
local installation of the software.
Then I brought it up on Zephyr (class sipb), and a bunch of people
complained that "athrun gnu gtar" is used in scripts. So, maybe a few
people do care.
So I've created an arch/i386_deb40 (not a new volume, since it's so
small) which will have a symlink for "gtar" and the following README
file. If a few more symlinks are needed for "athrun" (or
"attachandrun") invocations, that's probably okay, but I think we
should try to keep the content to a minimum, and tell people "install
it locally" (or get it to be part of the base athena10 system).
Ken
------- README
The recommended approach for providing free or open-source software
under Athena 10 is likely to be to use local installation rather than
locker-provided software. (http://diswww.mit.edu/menelaus/athena10/569,
https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/x/2gM0AQ) For your own private
workstation, it's probably the right thing to do in any case. Public
Athena 10 machines may be a little trickier, but that issue can be
explored while Athena 10 is in development.
And as Athena 10 is going to be based on Ubuntu, which is based largely
on GNU software, it seems silly to try providing more copies of the same
software in a locker. (The same is true of Debathena.) Besides, in
recent years the locker has grown stagnant, so anything we provide here
is likely to eventually become out of date.
So, for now at least, we are not providing the gnu locker software for
Athena 10 (or Debathena) systems.
One exception: A number of scripts around Athena use "athrun gnu gtar"
to explicitly get the GNU version of tar (e.g., even on Solaris). Since
GNU tar is part of the base OS for Athena 10, a symbolic link will keep
the explicit pathname reference working, without our needing to keep
current with the latest release.
