[GNC-dev] Wiki Building Instructions Reorganization

[John Ralls]

> On Sep 22, 2018, at 1:48 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op zaterdag 22 september 2018 00:10:16 CEST schreef davidcousens49 at gmail.com <mailto: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.
>> 

Gentoo uses a derivative of the BSD “ports” system called Portage: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage

Regards,
John Ralls