[GNC-dev] Wiki Building Instructions Reorganization

[Geert Janssens]

Op zaterdag 22 september 2018 00:10:16 CEST schreef davidcousens49 at gmail.com:
> >"What do you mean with "features type marketing" ?"
> 
> Geert
> 
> What I was getting at was that a comprehensive list of distributions that
> GnuCash runs on was more relevant to users making a decision to use it,
> hence the marketing (I didn't intend in the commercial sense though). I
> don't feel that its really necessary
> to cover every Linux version in the build instructions but perhaps more
> usefulto illustrate examples from  distributions pehaps where there may be
> more significant differences (I also don't know a lot about the different
> variants and we probably have to rely on our user base to provide
> information there).
> 
> The key bit of information is that you need to install specific tools and
> libraries/headers and you will use some sort of package manager to do that.
> 
Ok, thanks for clarifying.

Indeed we don't need a comprehensive list of distributions. On the other hand 
for a recipe to work well, it should list concrete steps for dependency 
installation. I know my biggest hurdle (even as an experienced developer) is 
to figure out the exact commands to search for and install packages and to 
find the proper package names. I know them pretty well for Fedora as that's my 
distro of choice, but sometimes I run tests in other distros and I always 
spend more time than I want on getting started. So in that area it would 
really be helpful to list the exact commands to get started per platform.

I would assume the whole debian based universe will be served with one set of 
instructions or perhaps a few, depending on tools that are available on 
certain releases.
Which reminds me: someone suggested to promote apt instead of apt-get as the 
preferred choice. I would only do so if all the distro releases we still care 
to support in the debian-sphere ship this tool. If not, I would be tempted to 
stick with apt-get for now and revise this in the future. For example does 
Ubuntu 14.04 already ship the apt tool ? Does Ubuntu 16.04 ?

For Fedora and derivatives the tool of choice is dnf. For arch it's pacman. 
For (Open)Suse it was yast last time I checked (which was a long time ago).
RHEL and CentOS as still using yum, but it's been a while since last time I 
tried to build gnucash on those. Usually the dependencies are an issue there.
I don't know about gentoo and derivatives.

I think those are the primary groups. There are plenty of others, but 
motivated users of other platforms are invited to contribute the details for 
their preferred platforms (and ideally keep them up to date).

> The user should from that be able to research what they need to use for
> their particular distribution if it is not one we specifically mention.
> 
Agreed.

Geert