What about providing a static binary???

[Peter Johansson]

Is it a stupid idea to provide a static binary on the DownloadPage?

[Jari Häkkinen]

Who is the target audience?

[Peter Johansson]

Well, the idea popped up when Mr. Green failed building on his laptop. Rather than installing the missing libraries (or locating the installation), he went to DownloadPage... and could not find what he was looking for.

[Jari Häkkinen]

Ok, we should create a static binary for Linux (Ubuntu I pressume). Should we do the same for MacOSX, Cygnus/Windows?, ...? Also, on modern Linux boxes it is not easy to create completely static binaries. The static option in configure.ac will only create semi-static binaries, that is, not all underlying libraries are provided by the underlying operating system by default. Of course, these could be installed and voila, of we go. Ah, I realize, I guess that Greens machine is a 32-bit machine, how about those 64-bit thingies?

Ok, as you may realize by now, I am not too keen on this ticket. It is doable but I do not think it is worth the maintenance cost. Is our target audience the common user or system/project administrator? If we think that the answer is the common man, then we should opt for binary downloads. I realize that the requirement of developer libs and headers for subversion and APR is non-trivial, but let us wait request from non-Ubuntu users. Or we should maybe convince Ubuntu developers to include svndigest in their distro?

[Peter Johansson]

Ok, let's wait.

[Peter Johansson]

I have never seen a static version of libsvn...

Providing a binary using dynamic libraries is a different story, but I think that should be taken care of outside svndigest project.