Fwd: [VOICENWS] General: Firefox web browser, we need your donation!

[Dave Yeo]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [VOICENWS] General: Firefox web browser, we need your donation!
Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:55:29 +0100
From: VOICE News Service <feed...@os2voice.org>
Reply-To: feed...@os2voice.org
To: ne...@os2voice.org

++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service http://www.os2voice.org ++

From: rwklei...@DESPAMmensys.nl

Hello everybody,

I'm sending out this email on behalf of the Mensys and Bitwise GmbH.
For the people who follow the Mozilla OS/2 newsgroup its quite obvious
it's taking more and more effort to compile current versions of the
Firefox web browser from the Mozilla foundation.

Also there are some stability issue's. Bitwise GmbH is working on
Firefox so we as commuity can easly compile it again for OS/2 and
eComStation.

What will be done are the following issue's:

* Clean up the build enviroment. with which Firefox is compiled.
* Currently the Mozilla foundation is thinking of removing the OS/2
support from the source code repository. The reason for this is because
we have patches in the OS/2 enviroment
we need to rewrite. These patches also make it difficult to compile a
stable web browser.
* What will also be implemented is IPC support. This will mean that if
one browser tab in Firefox crashes it will not make your web browser
crash.

The total goal is to get the current Firefox version compiling again on
OS/2/eComStation.

The amount of money we need is 8000 Euro for 3 months of full work on
Firefox.

You can buy sponsorunits via the Mensys shop:
http://www.mensys.com/shop/NetlabsJava6

While the webpage mentions only Java 6. All money will be used for the
Firefox deveopment.
100% of your donation will be send to Bitwise GmbH.

Bitwise GmbH is the company that is managed by Silvan Scherrer and they
worked on other open source community projects such as Java 6, QT 4,
ODIN and Samba for connectivity with Windows network.

Regards,

Roderick Klein
Mensys B.V
--

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[Curtis]

Dave,

Does this mean you'll get some of the money? Are they taking what you
have running now and enhancing to the current release level of Firefox,
i.e 18+ something...

Just wonder what your thoughts on this, since w/o your ongoing efforts,
the eCs Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey ports would have surely died.

Thanks,

On 02/01/13 01:47 pm, Dave Yeo wrote:
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [VOICENWS] General: Firefox web browser, we need your donation!
> Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:55:29 +0100
> From: VOICE News Service <feed...@os2voice.org>
> Reply-To: feed...@os2voice.org
> To: ne...@os2voice.org

> snip..

[Steve Wendt]

On 02/01/13 01:39 pm, Curtis wrote:

> Dave, Does this mean you'll get some of the money?

I wouldn't think so.

> Are they taking what you have running now and enhancing to the
> current release level of Firefox, i.e 18+ something...

Yes, that would be the idea. Hopefully they get Gecko 17 stable first,
since that is the current ESR branch.

[Dave Yeo]

Curtis wrote:
> Dave,
>
> Does this mean you'll get some of the money?

No, I've turned down any offers of money as it has been a hobby and I've
done the least work out of all the people that have maintained Mozilla.
I'm not that skilled and originally I was more of an alpha tester then
anything. I'll probably go back to being that though depending I might
still release builds.

> Are they taking what you
> have running now and enhancing to the current release level of Firefox,
> i.e 18+ something...

I'm sure they'll use most of the fixes that have been done over the
years, Rich did some good stuff plus we've fixed things like webm. Once
IPC is done, a lot of things should just work.
If it was me, I'd start with getting 17esr working, then move to trunk
which would work out to something like 20.

>
> Just wonder what your thoughts on this, since w/o your ongoing efforts,
> the eCs Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey ports would have surely died.

Unluckily the ports will be dead in a couple of weeks when support for
10esr ends.
We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would be
a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable mess
as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.
There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
something that even the Linux distros don't do. They usually put it
somewhere under /usr/lib and put a script under /usr/bin. This also
allows SeaMonkey and Thunderbird to co-exist.
Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
a lot of other users feel the same way.
Dave

[Andreas Buchinger]

Dave Yeo schrieb:
....

> Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that a lot of other users feel
> the same way.
> Dave

I totally agree. Never felt Firefox nearly as comfortable as Seamonkey.
Andreas

[Paavo Nurminen]

Dave Yeo wrote:
> Curtis wrote:
>> Dave,

>>
>
> There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
> something that even the Linux distros don't do. They usually put it
> somewhere under /usr/lib and put a script under /usr/bin. This also
> allows SeaMonkey and Thunderbird to co-exist.
> Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
> a lot of other users feel the same way.
> Dave
>

Dave,

at least for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Firefox comes as RPM
package, as everything else.
And I have Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey installed in RHEL.
And Opera.

Paavo

[Allan]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:

> We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
> port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would be
> a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable mess
> as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.
> There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
> something that even the Linux distros don't do.

Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users like it
or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them any money.

> Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
> a lot of other users feel the same way.

Seamonkey prefered here too.

--
Allan.

It is better to close your mouth, and look like a fool,
than to open it, and remove all doubt.

[Dave Yeo]

Where are the binaries actually installed by RPM? Try which Firefox.
Dave

[Paavo Nurminen]

In RPM land the command is: rpm -ql firefox (or seamonkey).

Binaries (shell script) are in /usr/bin and most of other files in
/usr/lib/firefox and its subdirectories. Same structure for seamonkey.

Paavo

[Andreas Buchinger]

Allan schrieb:

> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo<dave....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
>> port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would be
>> a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable mess
>> as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.
>> There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
>> something that even the Linux distros don't do.
>
> Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
> all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users like it
> or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them any money.

Rather stupid statement that is. I think we do not need another flame thread against rpm. Or flame
against people who contributed a lot last year.

Only looking into one of the latest ported apps from Silvan you would easily see even in the readme
hints on installing with AND without rpm. Silvan even did the extra work to describe how to install
without rpm. I really have now clue why you post such nonsense.

[Dave Yeo]

Yes, that is how most Linux distros do it and the way it should be done
on OS/2. The problem is if they try to actually put firefox.exe in
/usr/bin, the DLLs in /usr/lib and the rest in /usr/share. Firefox is
just not made to be installed that way and having Firefox, SeaMonkey and
Thunderbird co-existing would be very hard.
Dave

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Andreas Buchinger wrote:

> Allan schrieb:
>
>> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo<dave....@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing
>>> the port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which
>>> would be a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an
>>> unmaintainable mess as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and
>>> Thunderbird uncompilable. There was also mention of converting
>>> Firefox totally to RPM. This is something that even the Linux
>>> distros don't do.
>>
>> Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
>> all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users
>> like it or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them
>> any money.
>
> Rather stupid statement that is. I think we do not need another
> flame thread against rpm. Or flame against people who contributed a
> lot last year.
>
> Only looking into one of the latest ported apps from Silvan you
> would easily see even in the readme hints on installing with AND
> without rpm. Silvan even did the extra work to describe how to
> install without rpm. I really have now clue why you post such
> nonsense.

I agree.

The problem is that users (even advanced users like Allan) don't
uderstand that developers have to manage the problem of spare time and
resources. Many users still live in the well-supported-by-IBM world.

Times have changed. Dmitry explained it very well in the Qt
bugtracker, why an additional small effort to get YUM to work will
save time for him, Silvan and (of course) Yuri. Please read:
http://svn.netlabs.org/qt4/ticket/181

BTW: I'm sure that adding the needed features to WarpIN would have
occupied too much resources. If it were that easy then already Paul
and even Ulrich would have extended WarpIN. It was much easier to port
an well-working installer that has these features already.

No, I don't like the Unix FHS either. Additionally, I don't like a
Win32 subsystem on my OS/2 system. But we have no choice. Users need
to understand that.

--
Andreas Schnellbacher

[Doug Bissett]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
> a lot of other users feel the same way.

I have to argue the other way. I prefer Firefox. I have no need of a
news reader, or mail, since I use Pronews/2 and PMMail. All I need is
a browser that will work with some pretty basic web sites (including
online banking). FLASH is a bonus, but not having it for a couple of
years didn't impact me much.

On the other hand, if it becomes a problem to maintain Firefox, and
Seamonkey is still working, I would have no real problem with using
Seamonkey as a browser. It would be good, if it could be packaged in
modules, so a user could install the part(s) that they want to use,
but I suspect that it doesn't lend itself to doing it that way.

--
From the eComStation of Doug Bissett
dougb007 at telus dot net
(Please make the obvious changes, to e-mail me)

[Steve Wendt]

On 02/01/13 11:24 pm, Dave Yeo wrote:

> We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
> port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would be
> a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable mess
> as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.

I hope they plan to actively submit patches back to Mozilla. It's
possible that some may not be accepted (especially if they don't put in
the extra effort to adjust to feedback from reviewers), but getting as
much as possible into the main codebase should be the goal. Otherwise,
they can't call it Firefox.

[Andy]

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 22:12:16 UTC, "Doug Bissett"
<dougb007!SP...@telus.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
> > a lot of other users feel the same way.
>
> I have to argue the other way. I prefer Firefox. I have no need of a
> news reader, or mail, since I use Pronews/2 and PMMail. All I need is
> a browser that will work with some pretty basic web sites (including
> online banking). FLASH is a bonus, but not having it for a couple of
> years didn't impact me much.
>
> On the other hand, if it becomes a problem to maintain Firefox, and
> Seamonkey is still working, I would have no real problem with using
> Seamonkey as a browser. It would be good, if it could be packaged in
> modules, so a user could install the part(s) that they want to use,
> but I suspect that it doesn't lend itself to doing it that way.
>

I just checked the sizes... initially the Firefox was the larger but
then I recalled I had used lxlite on Seamonkey and not on Firefox so I
ran the lxlite on it. ~58,000K for Firefox and `61,000K. Memory-wise
it won't use more memory unless using the other functions. Even if I
didn't use the email program (as I don't on Linux) I still prefer the
interface of Seamonkey.
Overall, I seem to see more interest in Seamonkey than Firefox from
OS/2 users but if there were a way to find it I would be curious of
the actual breakdown.
Andy


--

[Ray Davison]

Paavo Nurminen wrote:

> In RPM land the command is: rpm -ql firefox (or seamonkey).
>
> Binaries (shell script) are in /usr/bin and most of other files in
> /usr/lib/firefox and its subdirectories. Same structure for seamonkey.

Since the first release of Mozilla I have used nothing but ZIP distros
for both OS/2 and Win. I put things where I want them. My first rule
is no EXEs or data in a boot partition. I have OS/2 and Win use the
same profile files. And I design all the directory trees as I chose. I
maintain several versions of each app. Mozilla has been very user
friendly in this regard. If some installer is now going to tell me
where to put the various parts, I want nothing to do with it.

Ray

[Doug Bissett]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 00:06:38 UTC, Steve Wendt <spa...@forgetit.org>
wrote:

> I hope they plan to actively submit patches back to Mozilla. It's
> possible that some may not be accepted (especially if they don't put in
> the extra effort to adjust to feedback from reviewers), but getting as
> much as possible into the main codebase should be the goal. Otherwise,
> they can't call it Firefox.
>

Personally, I don't care if they call it "Fred", as long as it does
the job.

[Allan]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 00:53:30 UTC, Ray Davison <ray...@charter.net> wrote:

> Paavo Nurminen wrote:
>
> > In RPM land the command is: rpm -ql firefox (or seamonkey).
> >
> > Binaries (shell script) are in /usr/bin and most of other files in
> > /usr/lib/firefox and its subdirectories. Same structure for seamonkey.
>
> Since the first release of Mozilla I have used nothing but ZIP distros
> for both OS/2 and Win. I put things where I want them. My first rule
> is no EXEs or data in a boot partition.

Exactly. :-)

Unfortunately, RPM is the Linux way - all on "1 partition".

> I have OS/2 and Win use the
> same profile files. And I design all the directory trees as I chose. I
> maintain several versions of each app. Mozilla has been very user
> friendly in this regard. If some installer is now going to tell me
> where to put the various parts, I want nothing to do with it.

I'm not sure, you will get a choice anymore.

Even Mensys decided to 'RPM' the next eCS release.

Take it or leave it :-/

[Dave Yeo]

Andreas Schnellbacher wrote:
>>> Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
>>> >> all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users
>>> >> like it or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them
>>> >> any money.
>> >
>> > Rather stupid statement that is. I think we do not need another
>> > flame thread against rpm. Or flame against people who contributed a
>> > lot last year.
>> >
>> > Only looking into one of the latest ported apps from Silvan you
>> > would easily see even in the readme hints on installing with AND
>> > without rpm. Silvan even did the extra work to describe how to
>> > install without rpm. I really have now clue why you post such
>> > nonsense.
> I agree.
>
> The problem is that users (even advanced users like Allan) don't
> uderstand that developers have to manage the problem of spare time and
> resources. Many users still live in the well-supported-by-IBM world.
>
> Times have changed. Dmitry explained it very well in the Qt
> bugtracker, why an additional small effort to get YUM to work will
> save time for him, Silvan and (of course) Yuri. Please read:
> http://svn.netlabs.org/qt4/ticket/181

Having a package manager is a very good idea, especially for managing
DLLs, especially on OS/2 where we're restricted to 8.3 DLL names and no
kind of versioning (besides the short name). Same with some binaries.
The problem comes with applications such as Firefox. Firefox is
descended from Netscape and is designed to be a standalone program. As
long as Firefox knows it's location, it can load its shared libraries,
find its components directory, builtin extensions and such. It has been
extended to use environmental variables such %MOZILLA_HOME% to find
other stuff such as plugins and users profile.
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, Linux generally handles this by
installing the Firefox package somewhere under /usr/lib and putting a
script in the PATH, namely /usr/bin which launches Firefox. Often under
Linux Firefox also uses some of the system shared libraries which are
installed under /usr/lib, the mzfntcfgft libraries are the start of
this, others will follow as some things like sqlite3 have dropped OS/2
support so will need to be installed separately and it may be easier for
other libraries such as Cairo. This also has the advantage that perhaps
updating Cairo fixing printing in all Mozilla apps and versions.
The problem is that Dimitri was wanting to install firefox.exe in
/usr/bin, the firefox dlls under /usr/lib and I guess other stuff under
/usr/share. Firefox is not made for this and would take a lot of hacking
to make work. And what about SeaMonkey and Thunderbird? Conflicts galore
as they use mostly the same DLLs etc.
This is the problem of taking the FHS too far and they're asking for a
lot of money which in my opinion (and most Linux distros) would be
wasted and break Mozilla for the rest of us.
Have a RPM package that installs Firefox the Linux way and someone else
can move it and it'll keep working.

>
> BTW: I'm sure that adding the needed features to WarpIN would have
> occupied too much resources. If it were that easy then already Paul
> and even Ulrich would have extended WarpIN. It was much easier to port
> an well-working installer that has these features already.

A good package manager can be a wonderful thing and WarpIN was never
meant for that, just a simple installer.

>
> No, I don't like the Unix FHS either. Additionally, I don't like a
> Win32 subsystem on my OS/2 system. But we have no choice. Users need
> to understand that.

Dave

[Dave Yeo]

I'll probably try to keep building packages as I have with 10. Possibly
there will be more dependencies but these would just have to go on your
LIBPATH.
Dave

[Dave Yeo]

Doug Bissett wrote:
> On the other hand, if it becomes a problem to maintain Firefox, and
> Seamonkey is still working, I would have no real problem with using
> Seamonkey as a browser. It would be good, if it could be packaged in
> modules, so a user could install the part(s) that they want to use,
> but I suspect that it doesn't lend itself to doing it that way.

The way it works, if Firefox stops working, SeaMonkey is dead. I always
start with Firefox as SeaMonkey is basically built on top of it. Really
there is no reason that all 3+ Mozilla apps should build if Firefox builds.
It's a shame that Mozilla lost interest in sharing more of the compiled
code. At one point there was going to be one program, xul-runner that
would run Firefox, Thunderbird, etc saving on having all these DLLs
duplicated but I believe that's pretty dead in the water now.
Dave

[Dave Yeo]

Andy wrote:
> I just checked the sizes... initially the Firefox was the larger but
> then I recalled I had used lxlite on Seamonkey and not on Firefox so I
> ran the lxlite on it. ~58,000K for Firefox and `61,000K. Memory-wise
> it won't use more memory unless using the other functions. Even if I
> didn't use the email program (as I don't on Linux) I still prefer the
> interface of Seamonkey.

The packaging process itself lxlites the DLLs and binaries. It has to
since we switched to wlink the binaries were huge. Rich chose the lxlite
parameters as much for compatibility as maximum size shrinkage. I forget
the actual reasoning now.

> Overall, I seem to see more interest in Seamonkey than Firefox from
> OS/2 users but if there were a way to find it I would be curious of
> the actual breakdown.

That's how it seems to me. Be interesting to have the download stats.
I requested a poll at os2world on browser usage as Mensys seems only
interested in Firefox.
Dave

[Dave Yeo]

The last I heard, they were planning on submitting patches upstream and
they're aware of the branding issue.
Dave

[Felix Miata]

On 2013-02-03 04:38 (GMT+0200) Allan composed:

> On Sun, 3 Feb 2013 00:53:30 UTC, Ray Davison wrote:

>> Paavo Nurminen wrote:

>> > In RPM land the command is: rpm -ql firefox (or seamonkey).

>> > Binaries (shell script) are in /usr/bin and most of other files in
>> > /usr/lib/firefox and its subdirectories. Same structure for seamonkey.

>> Since the first release of Mozilla I have used nothing but ZIP distros
>> for both OS/2 and Win. I put things where I want them. My first rule
>> is no EXEs or data in a boot partition.

> Exactly. :-)

+1

> Unfortunately, RPM is the Linux way

A Linux way. There is also DEB, and OPKG, and other packaging systems I'm not
familiar with.

> - all on "1 partition".

Not true.

Even though I keep large apps on a separate partition from OS in OS/2, and
data on a third or more, I'm not bothered that Linux mixes apps and OS on the
same partition. Linux allows for segregation of user data on a separate
partition, which is what I do except for some test installations. Plus, Linux
is more flexible in locating things, without any need for a limited number of
"drive" letters, and via the concepts of symlinks and permissions, and
mounting and unmounting partitions without need for rebooting.

OS/2's use of binary INI files for configuration is exasperating, while Linux
config files, without regard for filename extensions, are usually user
manipulable plain text files that make migrating from one installation to
another, and selective backup and restore, much easier. And of course Linux
never crashes due to the special RAM space below 512M allocated beyond what
the kernel can manage.

>> I have OS/2 and Win use the
>> same profile files. And I design all the directory trees as I chose. I
>> maintain several versions of each app. Mozilla has been very user
>> friendly in this regard. If some installer is now going to tell me
>> where to put the various parts, I want nothing to do with it.

> I'm not sure, you will get a choice anymore.

Linux permits installation outside the package management system to alternate
locations. I keep various extra versions of the Mozillas installed in
/usr/local (I could just as well put them somewhere in /opt or /home or an
arbitrary directory name I created myself), and have no problem running 5
different ones at the same time continuously for days on end across five
different desktops (of 8 total) on the same system, with yet more as
circumstances dictate simultaneously running alternate screen resolutions
that need not be confined to what the display actually supports.

If I were ever to figure out a way to get ancient DOS apps under Linux to
behave as superbly as they do in OS/2, the only reason left to run eCS here
would be PMView.
--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Dave Yeo wrote:

> The problem is that Dimitri was wanting to install firefox.exe in
> /usr/bin, the firefox dlls under /usr/lib and I guess other stuff
> under /usr/share.

Are you sure? YUM/RPM is able to install everything everywhere.
Installed packages don't have to comply with the FHS. Except for
Cairo, Fontconfig etc., it doesn't make much sense to use the FHS for
Mozilla apps.

--
Andreas Schnellbacher

[Dave Yeo]

I'm sure he was. Whether he still wants to after having a chance to look
at the source, I don't know.
We'll have to wait and see how progress goes
Dave

[Steve Wendt]

On 02/02/13 06:08 pm, Doug Bissett wrote:

>> I hope they plan to actively submit patches back to Mozilla. It's
>> possible that some may not be accepted (especially if they don't put in
>> the extra effort to adjust to feedback from reviewers), but getting as
>> much as possible into the main codebase should be the goal. Otherwise,
>> they can't call it Firefox.
>
> Personally, I don't care if they call it "Fred", as long as it does
> the job.

The biggest problem with "Fred" is that it will become quickly
unmaintainable, just like Lucide.

[Peter Brown]

Hi

As I understand it yum/rpm will be included in eCS2.2 for the purpose of
installing some of the optional software packages; odin, java and a few
others.

The chances are a lot of existing users that they will already have the
software installed to a "non-boot" volume and they will simply need to
add a few config.sys entries to get the software working on the 2.2
installation.

If the software is not already installed it is possible to download zip
packages and install manually. Be aware that it may be necessary to
unzip a package to a temporary directory then copy the required files to
wherever in order to avoid the idea some bright spark has had of having
the zip file package having a root directory such as %UNIXHOME%.


Regards

Pete

[Silvan Scherrer]

Allan,

Allan wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
>>port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would be
>>a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable mess
>>as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.
>>There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
>>something that even the Linux distros don't do.
>
>
> Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
> all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users like it
> or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them any money.

Thank you for your nice words. I will take them into account when it
comes to fixing tickets for you. And it's always good to read what
people think is on our (Bitwise works GmbH) agenda.

I will not go any deeper into this.

[Allan]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2013 15:29:28 UTC, Silvan Scherrer <silvan....@aroa.ch> wrote:

> > Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
> > all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users like it
> > or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them any money.

> Thank you for your nice words. I will take them into account when it
> comes to fixing tickets for you.

Fixing tickets for me ? I have never requested personal fixes of anything.
I have only reported bugs that happens in whatever software I test.
I'm so sorry, if my help with testing your products seems to be a problem
for you - quite the opposite was my intention.

Many developers and companies usually asks me to test some of their
stuff - and they are usually very happy about the feedback. It seems you
clearly have another oppinion, and I urge you to please just remove
whatever tickets I have in your projects - as I do not want to be the reason
for all other users of your products do not get their bugs fixed - since they
may rely on what I have reported (and which you clearly will not fix).

> And it's always good to read what people think is on our (Bitwise works GmbH) agenda.

I hope so.

> I will not go any deeper into this.

Oh, nice you agree, that BitWise have a 'personal' RPM agenda, and people shouldn't
pay, if they don't agree.

[mozilla_test]

On 03.02.13 05.24, Dave Yeo wrote:

Hi,

> Having a package manager is a very good idea, especially for managing
> DLLs, especially on OS/2 where we're restricted to 8.3 DLL names and no
> kind of versioning (besides the short name). Same with some binaries.
> The problem comes with applications such as Firefox. Firefox is
> descended from Netscape and is designed to be a standalone program. As
> long as Firefox knows it's location, it can load its shared libraries,
> find its components directory, builtin extensions and such. It has been
> extended to use environmental variables such %MOZILLA_HOME% to find
> other stuff such as plugins and users profile.

the end user package type shouldn't be the first on their todo list. It
was always easy for users to get Mozilla's apps working. I prefer the
zip files, other may like wpi, rpm or exe based installation methods.
The build and package system should be open to make it possible to
create different type of packages and follow the one dir rule for the
exe and main internal libs. Theres no need for that on Win why should it
now be required to have it on eCS & OS/2?
They should focus on the main code, we meed to go for the 17.0 ESR
branch to be on a newer code base. The rapid version release is maybe
just too fast and a waste of time for fixing things.

--
cheers
mozilla_test

[Curtis]

I've already contributed money... I want firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey
to continue on eCs. Personally, I don't want this to delve into a flame
war on package managers/installers/zip tarballs.. Who cares? A working
modern web browser and email client is the goal.

[kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl]

In <0M-dndRUQqV-KIzM...@mozilla.org>, on 02/05/13

at 08:46 PM, Curtis <cfi...@sysstream.net> said:


>I've already contributed money... I want firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey
>to continue on eCs. Personally, I don't want this to delve into a flame
>war on package managers/installers/zip tarballs.. Who cares? A working
>modern web browser and email client is the goal.

I will contribute soon. Just a few thoughts on the matter...
Allen wrote in his post about the 'agenda' of bitwise works. The word
agenda conjures up images of conspiracies. There is not a question of
conspiracies or agendas here. Sylvan has put his time and some of his
private money in developing software that is available without any charge
for eCS users. While doing that he and his developer(s) has (have) decided
RPM/YUM is in their opinion the best way to distribute said software. This
is a purely technical decision and not everyone may agree with it. Indeed,
everyone is free to develop and distribute this software in any other way
they want. The problem is, nobody is actually doing that. Dave's been on
his own doing Mozilla for eCS. And that is mot enough. I have seeen others
here interested in helping out, but nothing has come of it. I for one am
grateful Sylvan puts the effort in. I personally would prefer zip
distributions too. I presume Sylvan and Dmitry Dave will still consult
with Dave about technical matters and it may be that we retain zips, or
not. The main point is we get an up-to-date Mozilla. Preferably Firefox
AND sea monkey.

As for Sylvans reaction to Alans post. I can understand he was a tad
ticked off. Scrapping tickets is not the right reaction though. The right
reaction is shrug, perhaps have a nice malt whisky, and go on doing what
people donate for and appriciate.

As an aside, I would like to point out the readme's of Dani's driver.
Especially the one about reporting bugs. The wording of it makes very
clear what kind of flak developers get from users, even for free
software.....

>On 02/04/13 10:29 am, Silvan Scherrer wrote:
>> Allan,
>>
>>
>> Allan wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We're going to have to see what direction Dimitri takes in doing the
>>>> port. He mentioned converting the build system to kbuild which would
>>>> be a total waste of resources and possibly lead to an unmaintainable
>>>> mess as well as possibly make SeaMonkey and Thunderbird uncompilable.
>>>> There was also mention of converting Firefox totally to RPM. This is
>>>> something that even the Linux distros don't do.
>>>
>>>
>>> Are you surprised ? It has always been BitWise's agenda, to destroy
>>> all existing installers, in favour of RPM, no matter if the users like it
>>> or not. Only thing to do about that, is NOT sending them any money.
>> Thank you for your nice words. I will take them into account when it
>> comes to fixing tickets for you. And it's always good to read what
>> people think is on our (Bitwise works GmbH) agenda.
>>
>> I will not go any deeper into this.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe
>>>> that a lot of other users feel the same way.
>>>
>>>
>>> Seamonkey prefered here too.
>>>

Cheers, Bjorn.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
k...@guzzi.demon.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------

[Steve Wendt]

On 2/5/2013 6:21 PM, kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl wrote:

> everyone is free to develop and distribute this software in any other way
> they want. The problem is, nobody is actually doing that.

That's not true; you will find WarpIn packages on Hobbes for Odin, Java,
and maybe Qt4 also (not sure).

[kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl]

In <IpydnZoQVuDQWYzM...@mozilla.org>, on 02/05/13

You are right about the distribution part. I was thinking mainly about
Mozilla, that's why wrote develop and distribute. Thnaks for pointing
this out:-)

[Dave Yeo]

Looking at the readme for the latest QT4, I also note that Sylvan made
the effort to make it capable of standing on its own without RPM.
Dave

[Steve Wendt]

On 2/5/2013 7:30 PM, Dave Yeo wrote:

> Looking at the readme for the latest QT4, I also note that Sylvan made
> the effort to make it capable of standing on its own without RPM.

Which is definitely appreciated.

[Dave Yeo]

On 02/05/13 06:21 pm, kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl wrote:
> it may be that we retain zips, or
> not. The main point is we get an up-to-date Mozilla. Preferably Firefox
> AND sea monkey.

Well Mensys and BitWise have become aware of the importance of SeaMonkey
and having everything co-exist and using RPM really should mean going
the Linux way. We may well end up with more dependencies as Mozilla uses
more system (in the Linux sense) libraries but they'd be easy enough to
package up and put in the LIBPATH. Where RPM shines is in updating those
libraries.
The packaging of the Mozilla apps also results in a zip so it should be
easy enough to keep.
Dave

[Curtis]

Silvan, I'll put more money where my mouth is it we could get a
firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey that updates itself. How do the other
distro's do that. Install once and done. Then
firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey update themselves. Is that a mozilla
branding issue?

[Steve Wendt]

On 2/5/2013 7:49 PM, Curtis wrote:

> Silvan, I'll put more money where my mouth is it we could get a
> firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey that updates itself.

That requires server infrastructure. I suspect they will choose to tell
you to use an RPM package, and use yum to update, if you want that.

[Steve Wendt]

On 2/5/2013 8:05 PM, Steve Wendt wrote:

> I suspect they will choose to tell you to use an RPM package, and use
> yum to update, if you want that.

On that note, for those who blather on about RPM/YUM like they are one
and the same thing - they are most definitely not.

RPM = package format, kind of like WPI (*not* like ZIP)
RPM came from Red Hat, Red Hat Package Manager, or some such

YUM = scripts to update your RPM packages
YUM came from YellowDog (a PPC clone of Red Hat), YellowDog Updater
Modified, adopted by Fedora long ago, and also Red Hat eventually

RPM and WPI are package formats, not archive formats like ZIP. That
means they can use different archive formats (I think WarpIn defaults to
bzip2, while RPM files can be one of many), and they can also include
scripts for doing things both pre-install and post-install.

This concludes your off topic rant for the day.

[Dave Yeo]

Not totally correct, rpm is also a package manager. You should be able
to do most everything with with rpm that you can do with yum. eg rpm.exe
--install foo instead of yum.exe install foo. Just that yum is much more
user friendly.
Rpm had quite a bad reputation at one time which was probably one of the
driving forces for front ends like yum and also replacements like deb +
dpkg/apt. Personally I'm much more familiar with debs and back in the
day rpm had a reputation of leading to dependency hell, especially if
using multiple repositories.
Dave

[Steve Wendt]

On 02/05/13 09:35 pm, Dave Yeo wrote:

> Not totally correct, rpm is also a package manager. You should be able
> to do most everything with with rpm that you can do with yum. eg rpm.exe
> --install foo instead of yum.exe install foo.

Yes, this is true. You can even specify a URL.

> Just that yum is much more user friendly.

That part is a bit debatable now, yum --help is shorter than rpm --help,
but there is still a lot. :-)
yum is really, really good at is automatic dependency resolution, and
updating what is already installed, using a very simple command.

> back in the day rpm had a reputation of leading to dependency hell,
> especially if using multiple repositories.

Yes, exactly; trying to install a package will tell you what you are
missing, so you would go find those, go back to step 1, and repeat a few
times. :-/

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Doug!

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 22:12:16 UTC, "Doug Bissett" <dougb007!SP...@telus.net> wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Feb 2013 07:24:47 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Personally I don't like Firefox as much as SeaMonkey and I believe that
> > a lot of other users feel the same way.
>

> I have to argue the other way. I prefer Firefox. I have no need of a
> news reader, or mail, since I use Pronews/2 and PMMail. All I need is
> a browser that will work with some pretty basic web sites (including
> online banking). FLASH is a bonus, but not having it for a couple of
> years didn't impact me much.

...I'm 100% with you on the above...Firefox here...I want it to be a good,
reliable, features matched browser.

No problems financially contributing to the cause...but I wish the roadmap was
more clearly defined and we (each one of us that should be supporting this) knew
exactly what we were getting into.

Anyone...anyone out there willing to detail the roadmap beyond the generic
'...need to get to the latest release version...'?

[Allan]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2013 20:45:12 UTC, "Dariusz Piatkowski" <dariusz@_NO-SPAM_mnsi.net> wrote:

> No problems financially contributing to the cause...but I wish the roadmap was
> more clearly defined and we (each one of us that should be supporting this) knew
> exactly what we were getting into.

That was exactly what I was trying to say (in another way), when I was writing about
BitWises agenda here. I don't like paying do hidden agendas (read: roadmaps)
either.

> Anyone...anyone out there willing to detail the roadmap beyond the generic
> '...need to get to the latest release version...'?

One can really only wonder, where the roadmap have ever been discussed with
the current developers. This list is the only Moz developer list I know of, and not a single
note about this update seems to have been discussed here.

[Ray Davison]

Curtis wrote:
> Silvan, I'll put more money where my mouth is it we could get a
> firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey that updates itself.

Be careful what you ask for. What do you do when the "update" doesn't
work. You just replaced an old functioning program with a new non
functioning program. And yes, I have gotten Mozilla products that I
could not use.

Ray

[Allan]

On Thu, 7 Feb 2013 17:39:39 UTC, Ray Davison <ray...@charter.net> wrote:

> Curtis wrote:
> > Silvan, I'll put more money where my mouth is it we could get a
> > firefox/thunderbird/seamonkey that updates itself.
>
> Be careful what you ask for. What do you do when the "update" doesn't
> work.

Install new Windoes ?

--
Allan.

[Paul Ratcliffe]

On Tue, 05 Feb 2013 20:27:02 -0800, Steve Wendt <spa...@forgetit.org> wrote:

> RPM and WPI are package formats, not archive formats like ZIP. That
> means they can use different archive formats (I think WarpIn defaults to
> bzip2, while RPM files can be one of many), and they can also include
> scripts for doing things both pre-install and post-install.

WPI is a bit of both really. Whilst the compression of files is done
using bzip2, the archive file is a WPI specific container containing
that bzip2 data alongside other information.

[Al Savage]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2013 04:27:02 UTC, Steve Wendt <spa...@forgetit.org>
wrote:

> RPM = package format, kind of like WPI (*not* like ZIP)
> RPM came from Red Hat, Red Hat Package Manager, or some such
>
> YUM = scripts to update your RPM packages
> YUM came from YellowDog (a PPC clone of Red Hat), YellowDog Updater
> Modified, adopted by Fedora long ago, and also Red Hat eventually

I would glady use RPM/YUM if I could get them to work. When I had
problems during installation, there did not seem to be any reasonable
support forum. No place to direct questions. The community with
answers does not appear to exist.

I have a half-installed YUM installation that gives errors about ncurses
and other things and I can't figure out what it's trying to tell me. I
tried using the bugtracking system and got swatted for mentioning a
long-standing problem with HPFS386.

Oh, and not being able to have YUM and Samba work together, due to the
UNIXROOT conflict. It just got to be too much work, after over a dozen
hours invested, to get YUM to begin to work.

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Al Savage wrote:

> I would glady use RPM/YUM if I could get them to work. When I had
> problems during installation, there did not seem to be any
> reasonable support forum. No place to direct questions. The
> community with answers does not appear to exist.

OK, there doesn't exist a gmane group for that project, but asking
questions in the known newsgroups or fora should help.

One method that has worked two times for me, was to delete everything
of it, download and install the most recent RPM/YUM bootstrap package
and reinstall everything again. That was much faster than asking
questions and waiting for answers.

> Oh, and not being able to have YUM and Samba work together, due to
> the UNIXROOT conflict. It just got to be too much work, after over a
> dozen hours invested, to get YUM to begin to work.

Yes, it's time for Samba to change to RPM. Just don't let the Samba
prerequisites overwrite the RPM ones. Also make sure that the RPM
files always come first (even before other system dirs).

The problem you talked about sound for me like an argument for
RPM/YUM, not againsts it. I'm sure that was one reason for Yuri and
Dmitriy to go that way.

--
Andreas Schnellbacher

[kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl]

In <14adnQ2-F8nJP6rM...@mozilla.org>, on 03/06/13

at 09:08 PM, Andreas Schnellbacher <andreas.sc...@web.de> said:

>> Oh, and not being able to have YUM and Samba work together, due to
>> the UNIXROOT conflict. It just got to be too much work, after over a
>> dozen hours invested, to get YUM to begin to work.

What unixroot conflict? I have it set to F:\ for both Samba and Yum/RPM
and they both work.

>Yes, it's time for Samba to change to RPM. Just don't let the Samba
>prerequisites overwrite the RPM ones. Also make sure that the RPM files
>always come first (even before other system dirs).

>The problem you talked about sound for me like an argument for RPM/YUM,
>not againsts it. I'm sure that was one reason for Yuri and Dmitriy to go
>that way.

[Dave Yeo]

kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl wrote:
> In<14adnQ2-F8nJP6rM...@mozilla.org>, on 03/06/13
> at 09:08 PM, Andreas Schnellbacher<andreas.sc...@web.de> said:
>
>>> >> Oh, and not being able to have YUM and Samba work together, due to
>>> >> the UNIXROOT conflict. It just got to be too much work, after over a
>>> >> dozen hours invested, to get YUM to begin to work.
> What unixroot conflict? I have it set to F:\ for both Samba and Yum/RPM
> and they both work.
>
>

I'm surprised as one of the more common errors is setting it to x:\
instead of the correct x:
Here UNIXROOT has been set to x: (a TVFS volume) for the longest time
for EMX and XFREE86 ports and I have a script to change it to Y: for
yum/rpm. I'll have to reverse that setup as more stuff uses yum/rpm
Dave

[Al Savage]

> >> Oh, and not being able to have YUM and Samba work together, due to
> >> the UNIXROOT conflict. It just got to be too much work, after over a
> >> dozen hours invested, to get YUM to begin to work.
>
> What unixroot conflict? I have it set to F:\ for both Samba and Yum/RPM
> and they both work.

I installed Samba's WPI first.
Its install script checks for the existance of the environmet var
UNIXROOT. If not present, it *sets* UNIXROOT to %bootdrive%\MPTN :

UnixRoot = SysBootDrive()||'\MPTN'

It adds a complementary entry to CONFIG.SYS

Later, I tried to install RPM/YUM
rpm-yum-bootstrap-1_3.wpi

It refuses to install, because UNIXROOT is not set to "bootdrive" ("C:")
(and it will *not* accept "C:\").

I asked about this, and was told that UNIXROOT is supposed to be a
mountpoint or drive designator, and should never represent a directory
(hence the disallow of the trailing "/").

What am I supposed to do? Deinstall Samba, I suppose. It's on my To-Do
list, but that list is very, very long, as I get only one day per week
to work on these boxes, and half the time I seem to spend finding
working tools like diff that actually work.

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Al Savage]

> One method that has worked two times for me, was to delete everything
> of it, download and install the most recent RPM/YUM bootstrap package
> and reinstall everything again. That was much faster than asking
> questions and waiting for answers.

I just tried this again:

[Q:\]yum install rpm
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package rpm.i386 0:4.8.1-14.oc00 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: coreutils for package: rpm-4.8.1-14.oc00.i386
--> Processing Dependency: /@unixroot/bin/sh for package:
rpm-4.8.1-14.oc00.i386

--> Running transaction check
---> Package ash.i386 0:0.0.0-10.oc00 set to be updated
---> Package coreutils.i386 0:8.6-9.oc00 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: ncurses for package:
coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386
--> Running transaction check
---> Package ncurses.i386 0:5.7-4.oc00 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

========================================================================
========

Package Arch Version Repository
Size
========================================================================
========

Installing:
rpm i386 4.8.1-14.oc00 netlabs-rel
650 k
Installing for dependencies:
ash i386 0.0.0-10.oc00 netlabs-rel
77 k
coreutils i386 8.6-9.oc00 netlabs-rel
5.2 M
ncurses i386 5.7-4.oc00 netlabs-rel
264 k

Transaction Summary
========================================================================
========

Install 4 Package(s)
Upgrade 0 Package(s)

Total size: 6.2 M
Installed size: 13 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing : ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386
1/4

Error unpacking rpm package ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386
error: unpacking of archive failed on file
/@unixroot/usr/bin/captoinfo.exe;5137
c88d: cpio: symlink
Installing : coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386
2/4

Error unpacking rpm package coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386
error: unpacking of archive failed on file
/@unixroot/usr/bin/cut;5137c88d: cpio
: symlink
Installing : ash-0.0.0-10.oc00.i386
3/4

Error unpacking rpm package ash-0.0.0-10.oc00.i386
error: unpacking of archive failed on file
/@unixroot/usr/bin/sh;5137c88d: cpio:
symlink
Installing : rpm-4.8.1-14.oc00.i386
4/4

Error unpacking rpm package rpm-4.8.1-14.oc00.i386
error: unpacking of archive failed on file
/@unixroot/usr/bin/rpmdb;5137c88d: cp
io: symlink

Failed:
ash.i386 0:0.0.0-10.oc00 coreutils.i386 0:8.6-9.oc00
ncurses.i386 0:5.7-4.oc00 rpm.i386 0:4.8.1-14.oc00

Complete!

====================================================================

Knowing nothing about RPM, I don't know from where it's trying to
unpack.

> Yes, it's time for Samba to change to RPM. Just don't let the Samba
> prerequisites overwrite the RPM ones.

Foolish me, I installed Samba first. I sure hope that WarpIn can
successfully uninstall it.

> Also make sure that the RPM
> files always come first (even before other system dirs).

Are we talking about LIBPATH here?

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Dave Yeo]

On 03/06/13 02:55 pm, Al Savage wrote:
>> One method that has worked two times for me, was to delete everything
>> of it, download and install the most recent RPM/YUM bootstrap package
>> and reinstall everything again. That was much faster than asking
>> questions and waiting for answers.
>
> I just tried this again:

[...]

>
> Error unpacking rpm package ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386
> error: unpacking of archive failed on file
> /@unixroot/usr/bin/captoinfo.exe;5137
> c88d: cpio: symlink
> Installing : coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386
> 2/4

It's failing to create symlinks. Do you have an old copy of the binutils
installed? Search for ln.exe and move any copies out of the way.
Really they should have used ln4exe (creates a small executable that
launches the linked executable) instead of symlinks, especially since
much of the system doesn't understand symlinks.

>
> Knowing nothing about RPM, I don't know from where it's trying to
> unpack.

Under /var/cache.
[...]
Dave

[Alex Taylor]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2013 22:40:03 UTC, "Al Savage" <asa...@iname.com> wrote:

> It refuses to install, because UNIXROOT is not set to "bootdrive" ("C:")
> (and it will *not* accept "C:\").
>
> I asked about this, and was told that UNIXROOT is supposed to be a
> mountpoint or drive designator, and should never represent a directory
> (hence the disallow of the trailing "/").

That's just a precaution, I believe. It's perfectly possible to install
RPM to a directory. The main concern is that not all third-party
packages might support it, but AFAIK all the core ones do.

On my system here I have an RPM-YUM setup in G:\rpm and another (for
different testing purposes) in Q:\rpm, and I have scripts to set UNIXROOT
to the respective directory on demand. Works fine so far.

You absolutely must not include a trailing (back)slash in UNIXROOT,
however.

--
Alex Taylor
http://www.altsan.org

Please take off hat when replying.

[Alex Taylor]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2013 22:55:54 UTC, "Al Savage" <asa...@iname.com> wrote:

> Error unpacking rpm package ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386
> error: unpacking of archive failed on file
> /@unixroot/usr/bin/captoinfo.exe;5137
> c88d: cpio: symlink

Just a WAG, but is it possible you have an obsolete version of cpio.exe
or rpm.exe in your PATH somewhere?

> ====================================================================
>
> Knowing nothing about RPM, I don't know from where it's trying to
> unpack.

Probably \var\cache\yum\netlabs-rel\packages (under UNIXROOT).

[kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl]

In <jemdnSxYJvdXXqrM...@mozilla.org>, on 03/06/13
at 02:31 PM, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> said:

>kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl wrote:

>I'm surprised as one of the more common errors is setting it to x:\
>instead of the correct x:

Ah yes, my mistake, it's set to f:

>Here UNIXROOT has been set to x: (a TVFS volume) for the longest time
>for EMX and XFREE86 ports and I have a script to change it to Y: for
>yum/rpm. I'll have to reverse that setup as more stuff uses yum/rpm Dave

[kbr_n...@guzzi.demon.nospam.nl]

In <YdXcPjhdfZKu-pn2-Qd9Iz8wloRzK@tori>, on 03/06/13

at 04:40 PM, "Al Savage" <asa...@iname.com> said:

>What am I supposed to do? Deinstall Samba, I suppose. It's on my To-Do
>list, but that list is very, very long, as I get only one day per week
>to work on these boxes, and half the time I seem to spend finding
>working tools like diff that actually work.

I had yum/rpm installed before samba, so I already had the unixroot set to
f: Can't you set it in the samba configuration to the same is in yum/rpm
and move the samba files that are in the mptn directory?

[Dave Yeo]

Alex Taylor wrote:
>> I asked about this, and was told that UNIXROOT is supposed to be a
>> > mountpoint or drive designator, and should never represent a directory
>> > (hence the disallow of the trailing "/").
> That's just a precaution, I believe. It's perfectly possible to install
> RPM to a directory. The main concern is that not all third-party
> packages might support it, but AFAIK all the core ones do.

I grepped through various sources and only found one package that
expected UNIXROOT to be root. That was libdvdcss and they removed all
the UNIXROOT stuff in the latest release.
Most just use it to do things like run %UNIXROOT%/bin/sh
Dave

[KO Myung-Hun]

Really ? It is still there in their git repository.

--
KO Myung-Hun

Using Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.7.2
Under OS/2 Warp 4 for Korean with FixPak #15
In VirtualBox v4.1.22 on Intel Core i7-3615QM 2.30GHz with 8GB RAM

Korean OS/2 User Community : http://www.ecomstation.co.kr

[Dave Yeo]

KO Myung-Hun wrote:
>
>
> Dave Yeo wrote:
>> Alex Taylor wrote:
>>>> I asked about this, and was told that UNIXROOT is supposed to be a
>>>>> mountpoint or drive designator, and should never represent a
>>>> directory
>>>>> (hence the disallow of the trailing "/").
>>> That's just a precaution, I believe. It's perfectly possible to install
>>> RPM to a directory. The main concern is that not all third-party
>>> packages might support it, but AFAIK all the core ones do.
>>
>> I grepped through various sources and only found one package that
>> expected UNIXROOT to be root. That was libdvdcss and they removed all
>> the UNIXROOT stuff in the latest release.
>
> Really ? It is still there in their git repository.
>

I thought that Flameeyes had a patch removing it commited, appears I was
mistaken. Looking at the code again, I'm also not sure if it matters if
UNIXROOT is a subdirectory or not.
Dave

[Al Savage]

On Thu, 7 Mar 2013 00:01:30 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Error unpacking rpm package ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386
> > error: unpacking of archive failed on file
> > /@unixroot/usr/bin/captoinfo.exe;5137
> > c88d: cpio: symlink
> > Installing : coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386
> > 2/4
>
> It's failing to create symlinks. Do you have an old copy of the binutils
> installed?

C:\ecs\KLIBC\bin\ln.exe 97,829 .a.. 11-23-07
C:\Unix_Tree\tmp\yumbt\bin\ln.exe 71,499 .a.. 11-23-10

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Dave Yeo]

Actually that should have been cpio.exe
Dave

[Al Savage]

Yes, there's a copy in \ECS\BIN from 2011, and a 2012 version in
\Unix_Tree\usr\bin .

Both report v2.11, though they are obviously different file sizes. I
can't check to see if exchanging them will make a difference right, now;
I just ran out of space on that volume (JFS: no resize utility for OS/2)
and am copying everything off to another drive in preparation to wipe
all the volumes on that disk and re-allocate them. That'll keep me busy
for a good, long while :(

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Al Savage]

I ran out of room on that partition, so I've juggled HDDs and re-created
all the partitions for that box, and now I have more room.

That was six hours. Easy, this ain't -- unless you do it all the time.

OK, so I deleted my entire previous YUM install and started over.
Bootstrap console ran but

yum install yum

wasn't able to install eight of the 55 packages:

Failed:
ash.i386 0:0.0.0-10.oc00 ca-certificates.noarch
0:2011.80-1.oc00
coreutils.i386 0:8.6-9.oc00 file-libs.i386 0:5.04-6.oc00
ncurses.i386 0:5.7-4.oc00 openssl.i386 0:1.0.0a-5.oc00
rpm.i386 0:4.8.1-14.oc00 tcl.i386 1:8.5.9-2.oc00


---------- yum.log

Mar 13 20:54:28 ash-0.0.0-10.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:34 file-libs-5.04-6.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:38 1:tcl-8.5.9-2.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:39 ca-certificates-2011.80-1.oc00.noarch: 100
Mar 13 20:54:42 openssl-1.0.0a-5.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:43 ncurses-5.7-4.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:43 coreutils-8.6-9.oc00.i386: 100
Mar 13 20:54:43 rpm-4.8.1-14.oc00.i386: 100

The exact errors scrolled off the VIO window and I couldn't find a log
that contained the same text, but it seemed to be complaining about cpio
and symlinks on every one AFAICT.

It seems like discussing this in a Mozilla NG is wrong; where should I
move this discussion?

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Dave Yeo]

Al Savage wrote:
> The exact errors scrolled off the VIO window and I couldn't find a log
> that contained the same text, but it seemed to be complaining about cpio
> and symlinks on every one AFAICT.

I don't know much about cpio but reading the man page, it seems it
should fall back to copying

>
> It seems like discussing this in a Mozilla NG is wrong; where should I
> move this discussion?

Good question. Perhaps best to open a ticket at Netlabs as there doesn't
seem to be a mailing list.
Dave

[Al Savage]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:28:19 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:

> > It seems like discussing this in a Mozilla NG is wrong; where should I
> > move this discussion?
>
> Good question. Perhaps best to open a ticket at Netlabs as there doesn't
> seem to be a mailing list.

http://svn.netlabs.org/rpm/ticket/59

[Crickets]

As I expressed at the start of this OT thread:

> I would glady use RPM/YUM if I could get them to work. When
> I had problems during installation, there did not seem to be
> any reasonable support forum. No place to direct questions.
> The community with answers does not appear to exist.

I don't see the RPM/YUM method of package install & mgmt being an
improvement over the (sometimes troubled) WarpIn practice, if mere users
can't obtain reasonably informed and reasonably timely help. I don't
know if the lack of a support channel is due to the freshness of the
endeavor, or if it will be similarly continued, but it doesn't look very
robust at the moment.

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Dave Yeo]

Al Savage wrote:
[...]

> As I expressed at the start of this OT thread:
>
>> I would glady use RPM/YUM if I could get them to work. When
>> I had problems during installation, there did not seem to be
>> any reasonable support forum. No place to direct questions.
>> The community with answers does not appear to exist.
>

> I don't see the RPM/YUM method of package install& mgmt being an

> improvement over the (sometimes troubled) WarpIn practice, if mere users
> can't obtain reasonably informed and reasonably timely help. I don't
> know if the lack of a support channel is due to the freshness of the
> endeavor, or if it will be similarly continued, but it doesn't look very
> robust at the moment.
>

The idea of a good package manager is a good one. Using Mozilla as an
example, it is possible to build Mozilla using various external system
libraries, Cairo and pixman, sqlite2, various graphic libraries, webm
etc. You do yum install Firefox and all the needed libraries are pulled
in. Later you do yum upgrade and libjpeg is replaced by openjpeg with
its assembly optimizations and pixman is updated with vastly improved
interpolation in the gradients path. Suddenly you're Firefox is faster
and that jagged line is now smooth on certain web pages. The next
upgrade updates Cairo and printing improves while still running the same
Firefox binary.
If the user, who has never heard of pixman tries to uninstall it, the
package manager complains that Firefox will also be removed.
The new version of Firefox needs a newer libc or gccxxx.dll, it
automatically gets installed/updated just by installing Firefox. User
decides to install SeaMonkey, the package manager knows that all the
dependencies are already installed. (and we'll probably have to start
splitting out libraries as it seems we have a hard 32 MB limit to the
size of a DLL object)
And Firefox is one of the easier cases.
The problems are, picking RPM to begin with. At one time it had a very
bad reputation for not being a very good package manager. I'll assume
that most of the problems have been fixed over the last decade.
It's still a complicated piece of software that was never meant to fit
into the OS/2 way so takes quite a bit of porting and decisions being
made early in the porting process that may turn out to be sub-optimal
such as basically requiring a dedicated partition. Only a couple of
developers actually working on it with most of the community being very
resistant to changing their ways. And those developers having limited
time to help the community.
So we end up with the problem of developers trying to make life easier
for themselves so they can actually get shit done and a community that
feels isolated and no-one bothering to do much support work including
things like a mailing list occupied with a bunch of knowledgeable people.
Hopefully with time the community will become more excepting, expertise
will evolve and we will get better support without a bunch of users
screaming that they don't want to change.
Dave

[Dave Yeo]

On 03/16/13 09:42 pm, Dave Yeo wrote:
> Hopefully with time the community will become more excepting, expertise
> will evolve and we will get better support without a bunch of users
> screaming that they don't want to change.

s/excepting//accepting/ of course
Dave

[Al Savage]

On Sun, 17 Mar 2013 04:42:05 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hopefully with time the community will become more excepting, expertise
> will evolve and we will get better support without a bunch of users
> screaming that they don't want to change.

Well-written, Dave. I appreciate your having taken the time to lay it
out thusly.

Change I can do. But there's only so much guessing I can handle, too.
I donate time & money where I can, but of course it's not always
sufficient.

--
Regards,
Al S.

[Bob]

All good points Dave. I run my systems with two OS partitions (one a
cold backup) and as much of the applications and data as possible on
other partitions to enable quick recovery. I can also keep the path
entries to a minimum. Maybe I could do that with an RPM based install
which defines the files' locations; I don't know. This is helped by not
having to deal with bits of the app scattered thoughout many unconnected
directories, as happens in Linux. A common location for libraries would
help. Certainly, I would need to be able to direct where the app goes.

Bob

[Dave Saville]

I think it is really a shame that OS/2 copied the DOS file system and
not *nix. The number of things that can be "fixed" by judicious use of
links and mount points is huge. I know that recent stuff complied with
KLIBC has soft links but they are really useless as most of the OS and
older programs don't understand them. :-(

If they really needed a drive letter to keep DOS happy then call the
lot C:
--
Regards
Dave Saville

[Dave Yeo]

If you don't like the way Linux does it, you probably won't like the way
RPM does it as it's the same. In my Firefox example, the DLLs could
still be indivually downloaded and installed where you choose. Just
means keeping track or using Warpin to keep track of their locations.
Dave

[Dave Yeo]

Well it was supposed to be the next DOS and the native file system is FAT.
One solution is to have a TVFS volume. Has better support for symlinks
then any *nix as you can link multiple directories to one TVFS directory
with a search order. A long time ago I installed an XFREE/2 package that
did just that. Ended up with a X: drive setup in a Unix fashion while
the actual files were scattered around. It's too bad the RPM porters
didn't go that route.
Dave

[Dave Saville]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:54:38 UTC, Dave Yeo <dave....@gmail.com>
wrote:

I assume you refer to the original - Torento Virtual File System? I
did look at it once a long time ago. I am sure I see those initials in
some boot message but it is something else I think.

--
Regards
Dave Saville

[Dave Yeo]

Yes, the Toronto Virtual File System, to quote the users guides introduction
The Toronto Virtual File System (TVFS) is an OS/2 Installable File
System that combines VM and UNIX (**) file system concepts. The
specific VM file system concept employed is the "CMS search path". The
specific UNIX file system concept employed is the "symbolic link". Each
of these concepts is described below.

Search for TVFS on Hobbes
Dave