Re: [Flaim-users] language bindings, debian packages, project obscurity

[Jeffrey W. B. <jw...@ac...>]

On Wed, 2006-08-16 at 13:23 -0600, Daniel Sanders wrote:
> Jeffrey,
>  
> Thank you for your interest in the FLAIM project.  Sorry about the
> difficulty in finding it.  We agree that its relative obscurity is a
> problem.  We are going to look at some things to get it more
> visibility in the search engines.
>  
> We would welcome your participation in the project.  Nobody is
> currently working on Perl bindings, so that is a great place to
> contribute.

C++ makes this project a bit larger than it would be if flaim were
implemented in C, but it can probably be done within our lifetimes :)

> We are planning on creating Debian packages - just haven't got to it
> yet.  Any pointers or help you would like to give us on that would
> also be welcome.

xflaim builds and tests on all of ubuntu 6.06 x86_64, ubuntu 6.06 ppc32,
debian 3.1 x86_64, and debian 3.1 x86, so I don't forsee a big problem
here.  Note that I'm not one of those Debian developer in-crowd type of
people.  But I think I can get the packages built.  Ubuntu requires
fewer secret handshakes than Debian, so that will probably be the first
people to accept the packages.  For Ubuntu Universe repository there are
hardly any requirements at all.

On the build side, there are a few hitches.  I didn't get any shlibs out
of a 'make test' and 'make libs' fails by way of not finding Java.  Java
is not exactly Free in that tricky DFSG sense (and there's no real Java
solution for ppc32 Linux), so I will likely try to strip out the java
build target temporarily.

> As with many open source projects, Novell's policy for projects it
> sponsors is to have contributors assign copyright back to Novell.  I
> hope that isn't a problem.  Of course, all contributions will be made
> available under the GPL (FLAIM's current licence).

Can the Perl bindings be managed through CPAN?  That would be the
canonical Perl way, and it will spread adoption.  Every platform that
has Perl also has CPAN, whereas many platforms do not have organized
package libraries like the one Debian provides.

As for the Debian packaging, you would probably want to keep that
separate also.  Because there is a certain impedance mismatch between
the flaim build process and the usual gnu autotools build, I think
you'll find it's best to keep that upstream (that's you) blissfully
unaware of the Debian sausage making.

If I make any actual changes on the flaim tree, I'll be pleased to
assign those copyrights back to Novell.

> If you need help using the FLAIM APIs, please let us know.  We would
> be glad to assist you as our time allows.

The links to the documentation from Novell Forge lead to non-existent
pages, but the links from the Bandit project work.  Maybe fix the links
on Forge, or maybe consolidate under the Bandit wiki?
 
[helpful descriptions of flaim and xflaim elided]

Just to confirm that I'm reading this correctly, is flaim concurrency
entirely by way of threads within a single process?  The way I read it,
only one process can work on the database at a time.

-Jeff Baker