RPMs

[Mark Doliner]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:23:05 -0400, Ethan Blanton wrote
> Stu Tomlinson spake unto us the following wisdom:
> > libpurple, libpurple-devel, pidgin, pidgin-devel, finch, finch-devel,
> > various "optional" plugins as libpurple-<plugin> (eg. libpurple-tcl,
> > libpurple-silc etc.)
> > 
> > Is this the way we want to go? It makes more sense to me to do this so
> > people can install just the components they need, and increases the
> > compatibility if we end up with 3rd party clients that don't want to
> > force pidgin on people.
> 
> Provided that this is solved for individual file downloads, I have no
> problem with it.  If it further inflates the number of RPMs in the
> current tracker list, that's bad.  (You have to add up an awful lot 
> of the less popular RPMs to arrive at the number of downloads for 
> *either* the .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 ... and they're almost impossible 
> to spot in the soup of RPMs and .exes.)
> 
> Perhaps we could put the main RPMs (which have higher download counts
> -- the FC1 RPM (perhaps artificially) has the highest download count
> of any package for beta6) on that page, and stuff the RPMs nobody
> cares about somewhere else, with a link.
> 
> A yum repository would of course be nice, but many people won't
> install a foreign yum repository, but will install individual
> packages.

For the record I don't think we should ever send people directly to the
sourceforge page where users have to pick one of the files.  It's a bit of a
monstrosity from a usability point of view.  I think a well-designed website
would eliminate this problem.

-Mark