[plt-scheme] PLT scheme download packages

On Mar  6, Curt Ferguson wrote:
> I'm wondering if there is any possibility of getting PLT scheme
> versions made available in the downloads section of the PLT website
> as *.deb packages for people like me who use apt-get installers and
> such.

I wanted to do that, but never got any help in producing a .deb file.
Actually, I'm more familiar with RPMs, but not enough to make one.
The main problem is that the result of our build process is a fully
compiled tree, and that needs to turn to the final installer package.
A proper RPM package (and .deb, AFAICT) should start with the source
instead, and that means that the build process is different -- so what
I was considering is a simple (ab)use of the package as a container
for the files that can unpack them and track them as usual.  I
eventually just went with a portable installer facility that works on
all unix-like machines.


> OS's such as Ubuntu use these packages and the number of people
> using them is growing every day.

But there is also a clear shift from downloading random packages from
the web to relying on the central repository of your distribution.


> Ubuntu 7.10 has a DrScheme package available in the ubuntu
> repositories, but it is version 360.  The new release of ubuntu
> coming out in April has the 372 package available, which is good,
> because for some reason the self-installing script for ubuntu isn't
> working for me and I'd like to use 372.

How did it broke?


> I don't know how much extra work it would take to do this (If I
> fully groked the *.deb package process I'd make one myself.)  But I
> think it'd be worthwhile.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!