Ole Laursen wrote:

> The problem is not just the binaries. The problem is also where to
> place the include files, the reference documentation, the examples,
> the .ini files etc.

I would recomend to use the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, explained on 
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ As far as I know most of the latest 
distributions are compliant so I don't see a lot of problems.

> RPM can't help you if you don't have the right version of a library.
> At most it will bark and stop. And I don't think you can mix RPMs from
> different vendors without trouble.

Yes it will stop and tell you the missing package so that you can install 
it. Mixing RPMs should make no trouble in most cases. I sometimes install 
RedHat RPMs on my SuSE box without any problems. And actually you don't 
need to mix libs from different vendors because most distributions are very 
complete.

>> > For one thing, RPM isn't even used by all distributions.
>> 
>> Right, but you'll find it on nearly all distributions, even on Debian.
> 
> While it is true that you can install RPMs in Debian too if you
> install alien, I doubt anyone is going to do that as long as there is
> a maintained Debian package which does the Right Thing for Debian.

Alien is just a converter wich is able to convert between RPM, DEB etc. and 
vice versa. And this could allready be a solution. But I'm sure there are 
lots of Debian users out there who are willing to build a Debian package. 
And you could install the whole RPM system on a Debian box but I assume 
that nobody will do that ... :)

> It is not that I think having povray.org binaries is per se a bad
> idea, but I think it might be harder than it appears and difficult to
> get right. And most distributions seem to package it themselves anyway
> (at least Debian, SuSE, Red Hat).

Of course you cannot include all possible distributions or even self made 
systems but it should be able to take the major ones into account. And when 
everything is going wrong, you can still use the old method.

Regards,
Andreas


-- 
http://www.render-zone.com

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