[owl-users] Re: getting involved in Owl

Henri -

Thank you for your reply.  I think we will need to take this to owl-dev,
but I'll reply in here for now.

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 06:14:17PM +0200, Henri Salo wrote:
> UTF-8 did definately need improvements. It should be on by default or at least a pretty good guide how to use it in various software.

Yes, we should take care of that.

> I have no idea how I could help you with that as I still aren't very good with pkgsrc,

This has nothing to do with pkgsrc.  While we have these instructions
for use of pkgsrc with Owl on the wiki and this is very nice, they're
just it - user-contributed instructions for possible use of these two
things together.  There's no special connection between Owl and pkgsrc,
and I think most Owl users don't use pkgsrc.

> but I could help to get apt to Owl. TODO-list says: "Support a package repository, possibly with Zypper, yum, or apt (package one of these - and its prerequisites)." does this mean that the apt should be in default-installation or optional installation from some other resource and if latter from where?

One of these three tools should probably get into the main tree of Owl.
Ditto for many other things, such as those needed for a LAMP stack.
(In fact, there will be some overlap between libraries needed for a
repository access tool and those needed for PHP, etc.)  One of the main
drawbacks of Owl so far has been that its out-of-the-box functionality
is very limited - we got to address that.

> I am not a Debian Developer, but I have used Debian for over eight years now so I think that should be my number one focus now in Owl if that is still what Owl needs. Deb-packages could be installed to some location outside of normal PATH using the same ideology as in with pkgsrc.

We don't intend to use .deb packages for Owl.  What is being considered
as one of the three main alternatives is using APT-RPM:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APT-RPM

In fact, we almost just went with Zypper, but this decision got delayed
as it turned out that Zypper, just like the others, has numerous
prerequisites that are not yet in Owl.  So we may want to get a LAMP
stack in first and then see which of these three repository management
tools needs fewer extra libraries added to Owl.

Alexander