Re: [Visualpython-users] Re: VPython for Suse Linux ? (fwd)

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

> Is there anyone who can help Nils Wagner on this? I gather that Suse is a 
> German flavor of Unix, and I don't think anyone in our group is familiar 
> with it.
> 
> >> --On Friday, October 20, 2000, 8:42 AM +0200 Nils Wagner
> >> <nw...@is...> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Is VPython also available for Suse Linux (http://www.suse.de) ?
> >>
> >> There is no specific package for this, but note that Visual (like Python)
> >> is open-source, so in principle you could recompile on Suse Linux.

but i'm betting the RH packages will work, with some tweaking. python
installations (thank goodness) seem pretty standard. you may have to play the
games some people were playing to get things working.

i apologize for the situation in general, but it's like this: i'm generating
RPMs by converting the deb's our build system makes. They are *perfectly* valid
RPMs, and nothing can *possibly* go wrong with this ... if you install them on
a debian machine :)

in fact, the only thing that will *ever* go wrong with them is that some
assumption that the debian packages make about python locations or library
names fails. So far all the python installations have behaved just fine. But a
couple of times we've been bitten by the library problem -- different
distributions call the library different things (even tho it's the same -- you
can usually fix it with a symlink).

If I could build RPMs on *one* RPM-based system and just have things work, I'd
chop off a little hdd space and do it. But the RPM-based system have the
charming property that they're all as different from each other as they are
from Debian; stricly speaking each *version* of each RPM-based system is
different. If i built RPMs for every system, i'd spend my whole life packaging
(this happens to people, btw. helix has people who hack package systems day and
night. it's not pretty).

So we're likely to be in this boat for the long run :) sorry.

> >>
> > Please can you give me further hints concerning the recompilation (on SuSE
> > Linux) .
> > Which version of Python do you recommend ? Which additional libraries
> > should be installed ?
> >

aha! recompilation should be very easy (as in "decent number of steps, all of
which should work faultlessly")

- check out the modules 'visual', 'cvisual' (and 'Programs' if you want the
  demos)
- do a 'make' in cvisual/. pray that it works
- if it doesn't work, give me previous warning so i can go hide, and post the
  fact so that someone else fixes it
- copy cvisualmodule.so (the product of the abovementioned successful compile)
  to /usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages
- copy everything in visual/ to /usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/visual (or
  somewhere similar but slightly different if your python1.5 site-packages/
  are somewhere else
- run the demo programs. put them somewhere globally accessible
  (/usr/share/python-visual/ maybe)
- complain to someone other than me if any of this doesn't work.

I could write 'make install' scripts for the above if people are interested.



ari