[Inx] Thread three: Ideas

[David Symons]

Hi Niels,

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Niels Egberts <niels.egberts at gmail.com> wrote:
> * An easy way to upgrade INX. I think the nicest method would be to create a
> .deb file with all the inx-scripts and let it depend on anything that needs
> to be installed on top of ubuntu-minimal, like vim, aptitude, pine, etc.
> Then it should be fairly easy to set up an inx-repository so that anyone can
> just use "sudo apt-get upgrade". For now, a PPA (personal package archive)
> on launchpad can be used. Everyone can host up to 1GB in the repository. And
> with that repository maybe it would be handy to be able to install INX on a
> regular ubuntu installation. I've got a minimal knowledge of creating deb's
> (I've packaged a few) but I would like to help in this process.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Complete is a really good place
to start.  As is the Debian New Maintainer's Guide
(http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/).

Currently INX's files are installed in the /usr/local directory tree.
That will have to change in order for INX to be acceptable to
Debian/Ubuntu (which I feel it should aspire to be).  A possible
restructuring would be to :
    - just have the one 'public' executable: /usr/bin/inx
    - the rest of /usr/local/bin moved to /usr/lib/inx/bin (except
bits that can logically be packaged separately, eg. cdmp and plait
(*g*).
    - things within /usr/local/share moved to /usr/share

That said, another upgrade method could be to distribute INX with
links to a Bazaar branch (on Launchpad).  Then an update could be
simply:
    cd /usr/local; bzr pull

> * Adding support for gettext to the scripts. For the ones that don't know,
> with gettext you can easily make your program multi-lingual. When you print
> a string, gettext searches for that string in the various .mo-files (1 file
> for every language) and prints it in the language chosen by the user. Also
> it can be linked with https://translations.launchpad.net/inx so that
> everyone can easlily help with translations whithout knowing about the
> technical stuff. I think being able to learn to commandline in your own
> language can be a big help.

Great idea!  The challenge will be translation that preserves the
wonderful "Peter_Garrett-ness" of the introduction, tutorials etc.
:-)

Cheers, Dave.
-- 
David Symons
Armidale NSW Australia
http://www.liberatedcomputing.net