From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Mon, 7/21/2025 2:46 AM, Jeff Layman wrote:   
      
   > Well, it looks to me as though you've confirmed "It's geekhub - "simple   
   instructions" never seems to apply.", with a 60+ line reply! And there seem to   
   be a few "ifs" and "buts" in it.   
   >   
   > I - and I guess many others - would prefer a straightforward *.deb or   
   *.tar.gz for installation. YMMV.   
   >   
      
   It's pretty simple. If something is not mainstream (and Google was not hinting   
   that this package was mainstream when I tried to check for that), then   
   the possibility arises that a build from source will be required.   
      
   One reason I was suspicious of the package, is it had no release control info,   
   no version numbers evident. The hardware it supports is pretty old. If the   
   package   
   had been mainstream, you would expect "support activity" to keep alive the   
   package.   
   Packages can be removed from a distro, if no one supports them. That's why   
   a .deb can be two or three releases older than you might hope. Most of the   
   time, there have been enough library changes accumulated, to break the .deb.   
   Or for that matter, even break your ability to build from source.   
      
   If you want a thing bad enough, you build from source. And for packages   
   that haven't been touched for years, you have to be roughly as clever   
   as the developer, to get it to build. For example, anything with   
   Python in it, you have to be Python-fluent if you expect to ever   
   see that work. Python is a version-hell.   
      
   *******   
      
   When I was on a computer at work, which had no web browser, I built   
   my own browser. It took *40 hours* to build the library tree, to build   
   a browser. I built NCSA Mosaic. Just as I'm finished the build and   
   it is working, and our UNIX boxes can finally have a web browser of   
   their very own, the IT department phones and tells me to discard the   
   executable, as using the executable violates the license terms   
   ("no commercial usage"). So, I have to throw it away.   
      
   You can see in that example, how there is a pressing need, there   
   is a package source available, and if you want something bad enough,   
   you will compile from source. That was somewhere back in the X11R4/X11R5 era.   
      
   On the UNIX boxes, we continued to use Lynx browser (a "text" web browser),   
   which sucks mightily. And that was also compiled from source, only not   
   having the same license declaration. The UNIX boxes were SunOS or Solaris   
   era, and while they came with some packages for the OS, some areas   
   of computing were glaringly absent.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)