[bind10-dev] Ways to help get BIND 10 installed, was Big fat tarball for releases?

[Shane Kerr]

Anand & all,

On Mon, 2011-07-18 at 21:23 +0100, Anand Kumria wrote:
> > As I was downloading building packages for the various BIND 10
> > dependencies last week, I thought, "maybe we can just put all of these
> > in a tarball".
> 
> Ugh. As someone who has packaged things for Debian - and does
> occassionaly for other distributions.
> 
> Please no.

We discussed this on our team call last night, and we probably will not
be shipping a big tarball. (I'm allowed to have bad ideas, right?)

We do have two ideas for alternate approaches.

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OS-specific pages on the Wiki

We decided we should create OS-specific pages on the Wiki.

I checked today, and it turns out we already have system-specific pages
on the wiki - created by me no less! I went ahead and updated this a
tiny bit, and I also made a template so future pages aren't quite as
awful as the ones that I made:

  http://bind10.isc.org/wiki/SystemSpecificNotes

When we add future machines to our build farms in the future we'll add
them here. Also, we encourage user submissions, and we are happy to
point to off-site documentation if people prefer it on their own pages.
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Something like ./configure designed to figure out dependencies

When I install BIND 10 on a system, it is usually not a problem if the
computer takes an hour building the software. It's annoying for me to
have to check periodically and restart the build though.

This is how the recent Debian install went:

     1. Run ./configure
     2. See where it breaks
     3. If Debian package exists, install it and go to #1
     4. Otherwise, download the package, build & install it, and go to
        #1

On our call, Jinmei suggested that we can make a script like ./configure
that performs all checks instead of stopping when it finds a missing
dependency. At the end, it can report to the user a full list of missing
libraries. We might also output URLs where to download them, and
possibly a link to the system-specific notes (as per above).

I think it's a cool idea, although I am often wrong about what is
cool. :)
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--
Shane