Re: [wmii] Re: wmii 2.2 packages in Debian ready for an upgrade?

On Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 07:08:52PM +0100, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> Note: Unfortunately, there was some missunderstanding between me and my
> sponsor, so the current wmii in unstable is broken, because 9base is
> stuck at NEW[1]. In the meanwhile you can download the 9base package
> from [2] (this is not a test-package, it is the one uploaded to Debian
> and works well).

Any chances to get 9base officially into Debian-stable?

> Third: wmii only depends on rc-shell from 9base

I suppose you mean the version you packaged? In general the rc
scripts shipped with wmii depend on most stuff from 9base for
various reasons, especially because 9base uses a common regex
syntax and is completely utf8 compliant, beside the speed
side-effects through static linking small portions of code
(compared to the GNU counterparts). Those scripts also depend on
several flags of standard unix tools which have been seen in
original Unix and Plan 9 only, but not in GNU tools, for
instance 'date -n' for example beside of the unified regex
syntax.

> It is too much overhead to install 9base and all those 9base tools when
> only using the rc-shell. Unfortunately, wmii does not work with the
> original rc-shell[3], and the inclusion of just the rc-shell from 9base

Just to clarify, the original rc shell is included in 9base,
instead the rc-shell[3] from Byron Rakitzis is not(!) the original
rc shell. It has been developed at a time, when AT&T/Lucent kept
their code closed source. And Byron began to write an rc-alike
shell from scratch, which includes several incompatibilities (ie.
'else' instead of 'if not', different flatten operator - $^
instead of $", pretty weak scope handling, flaky globbing,
different fn-environment propagation, several unnecessary
builtins and esp. the nasty readline dependency).

> into wmii did not suceeded in the first trivial attempt.
> However, I will stay trying to get rid of the 9base depend on
> the long term, to keep wmii as small as possible.

Then it is better to depend on 9base, because wmii+9base SLOC is
smaller than bash SLOC (and 9base is nearly a complete
userland). This is also because we plan to depend on mk from
9base in the future, to get rid of the nasty incompliances among
different make implementations (GNU, BSD, Sun, whatever).
If there are any good reasons to modify the structure of 9base
to get better acceptance due packaging it, let me know. I
already received some hints from you about the manual page
conflicts. If the static linkage is unwanted, no problem, it is
just an option in 9base/config.mk to uncomment.

> [3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/rc

Many thanks for your packaging efforts!

Regards,

-- 
 Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361