I think we have an important bug regarding the information we convey for third party Deb or Rpm packagers.

As I reported months ago, the Squeakland download page is very far to be perfect for a free software packager because it brings *no* information about the source code. As you may know, each binary package comes with its source package.
As it is now, it is not clear at all for a thrird party packager where are the sources.

For an external viewer, it looks like Etoys pretend to be free software but it is not (source code not there) or it looks like someone want to protect some asset (Is it a post Sophie trauma?)

I wrote a proposal (far to be perfect) for the download page, but Tim removed it because of translation issue in the seb server, which I agree because the way it was rendered was far to be perfect)
While writing the proposal, I also received unfriendly feedback from Berg for tiny details.

Guys, do you have any problem providing information about the source code?
It is a tiny effort to clarify this situation.

Hilaire


2009/12/23 Milan Zimmermann <milan.zimmermann@sympatico.ca>

> The situation is different on Mac and Windows where so far Squeakland is
>  the only "vendor". But IMHO Squeakland cannot and should not try to be the
>  vendor for Etoys on Linux. It's a Good Thing (tm) there are no RPMs nor
>  DEBs on Squeakland for Etoys 4, because that would interfere with and
>  undermine the efforts of maintainers in the distros.

I definitely agree with that. I know you have been helping a lot to engage
them.

>  This of course should
>  be mentioned on the downloads page, and a tar ball should be provided so
>  that packagers know where to start and get new releases from.

We mention a bit about distros here:

http://wiki.squeakland.org/display/sq/Creating+Etoys+Release+for+Squeakland%2C+OLPC%2C+or+Etoys-
to-go

But yes, it should be on the download page ... and we should remove the old
versions from the download page, I think. But I don't know what exactly to put
in the tarball. If one of us remembers, let's bring it up on the next dev irc
meeting.


--
http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire