FreeOrion

In the wiki (http://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Programming_Work) it is said that there is need of people to compile and provide binaries and packages.
I can provide packages for Gentoo and Ubuntu, static or dynamic linked. Is this still needed?
Unfortunatelly, I don't own a Mac, but AFAIK the free OS Darwin is compatible with Mac OS and I can give a shot in compiling it in Darwin, but I don't know if it will be usable. Anyone has tried that?

If you could do a binary which runs on amd64 Ubuntu 8.10 you would be a god-send!! (At least, you would to me... I dunno if anyone else is trying to run it.)

Linux releases are definitely still needed. You might want to have a look at what kroddn has been doing, here:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1792

He's been providing mostly-statically linked binaries until recently. He has a file on his site to link graphviz statically, which might be of help. You might also want to get in contact with him to discuss this. He's still dropping by the forums regularly, even if he hasn't been posting much.

I don't know anything about OSX or Darwin, but having giving it a try probably couldn't hurt. If it works for OSX, great, and if it's just Darwin, then almost-as-great.

bolche wrote: I can provide packages for Gentoo and Ubuntu, static or dynamic linked. Is this still needed?

Static linked are best since they work on practically all distros.

Problem with linux packages(and maybe with windows, mac) should be resolved by nightly builds. It would help testing althought unit testing in FreeOrion is missing. There aren't many people on this board who are able to compile FreeOrion in Linux. And it should be compiled statically because sometimes they simply can't compile when it is some problem with dependency in their distro.

OndrejR wrote:Problem with linux packages(and maybe with windows, mac) should be resolved by nightly builds.

If you'd like to make regular Linux builds, feel free to start a thread like kroddn's and keep it updated, and we can link to it from the Downloads wiki page.

It would help testing althought unit testing in FreeOrion is missing.

tzlaine originally had some unit testing for effects code, but it didn't get much use, and I don't really see much use for it in general. It's hard to define "correct" behaviour for most non-trivial functions in a game like this...

That said, I'm not a software engineer and don't know that much about unit testing. If someone wants to make a use case and add some unit tests, we'll likely commit the patches.

Geoff the Medio wrote:If you'd like to make regular Linux builds, feel free to start a thread like kroddn's and keep it updated, and we can link to it from the Downloads wiki page.

I don't know how other projects make nightly builds. Probably they wrote own scripts. If it was human, he would forget. It has to be computer and automatically. Next six months I have no time for this, but later maybe. I have also problem with OS architecture. I had only amd64(compiling dynamically problem isn't). And upload binary to download server should be automatically too. But this is solvable(somebody with i686 OS can plan compiling at certain time with cron and script to upload to ftp is not problem).

In Debian I found packages svn-autoreleasedeb and svn-buildpackage. But they probably build only dynamically versions of software.

Its extremely hard to compile and link a statically version. I have invested a great amount of time until now to get things worked - but these methods are surely NOT for standard users, as you have to compile almost every dependency by yourself (boost, graphviz, maybe python...).

If somebody wants to talk about those topics, please visit the irc chat. I am online there and frequently can discuss things or answer questions.

For creating static binaries this tool might help? http://statifier.sourceforge.net/

Never tried it myself...

I know I will be giving ELF Statifier a try tonight when I see if I can compile the current SVN checkout in a VM and swap it to my parent machine. I'll report my success or failure by editing this post. (Maybe save Kroddn some effort)

Sorry for taking so long for posting the packages. Having trouble with my computer...