On Fri, 16 May 2008, Carol Bean wrote:

> I am being a little lazy here, hoping someone else might have already "been
> there, done that."
>
> A friend wrote:
>
> "many of the Open Source applications I tried to build needed lots of little
> bug fixes from the original source code to get them working. I'm guessing
> the big Linux distributions usually have everything tested out so it
> compiles without
> issues (most of the time) once you have all the tarballs... With all these
> Open Source sites, there isn't a site for distributing Open Source
> executables (plus required source), is there? I don't want to start a whole
> project on Sourceforge for orphan Open Source projects, just find a place to
> share precompiled Open Source programs (and source/patches) I like with some
> friends or anyone else who wants a copy."
>
> Done anyone know of open source repositories that have precompiled
> software?  (Especially low resource software)

The problem is, you have to deal with OS, architecture, etc.

When you don't have an audience of millions, especially if you're making
changes more frequently than your user base refreshes their versions, it's
often not worth the trouble.

        MacOSX : fink
        Debian : aptitude
        Solaris : SysV
        Red Hat : RPM

...etc.  For MacOSX alone, if you're going to support 10.3 to 10.5,
there's actually 7 builds:

        10.3 : PowerPC 32bit, PowerPC 64bit
        10.4 : PowerPC 32bit, PowerPC 64bit, Intel
        10.5 : PowerPC 64bit, Intel
(assuming you didn't do multi-architecture support, but even then, you
need 3)

...

What I'd suggest doing instead is using the various OS specific source
distribution systems, where you give a package description w/ where to get
the source from, a checksum, and the necessary patches for that platform
to get it to compile.  Ones that I know of include:

        FreeBSD : FreeBSD Ports
        OpenBSD : OpenBSD Ports
        MacOSX  : MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts)

(I have no idea what the equiv. are for Linux, Windows or other OSes)

...

And in some cases, there are language specific package managers ... CPAN
for Perl, PEAR for PHP, RubyGems for Ruby, etc.

...

One of the advantages of using these package managers is that they'll
often recursively get dependancies, so you don't have to have some 10 page
INSTALL file telling them where to get everything from, and how you expect
it to be configured & installed.


-Joe