[Slackbuilds-users] Dosbox philosophical question...

[Doogster]

Keep the DosBox SlackBuild at 0.74. Have separate SlackBuilds for the
SVN checkouts and forks.

I recommend at least thinking about this fork:

http://blog.yesterplay80.net/dosbox-ece-en/

I also wrote one of the best forks in existence, so I'm rather
uniquely qualified to comment on this.

https://github.com/duganchen/dosbox/blob/master/ENHANCEMENTS.md

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 5:58 AM, Arnaud
<arnaud.garcia-fernandez at laposte.net> wrote:
> Hi everybody!
>
>         well the question is not that philosophical...
>
> Dosbox is a nice project, and works quite well, even since the last version is
> as old as may 2010. It looks quite dead but it wouldn't matter much because it
> works pretty well as it is.
>         But the truth is the developement is still quite active, and there had
> been a lot of revisions since 0.74 was out. 0.74 is r3608, and latest is r4055
> and is dated from yesterday.
>
>         I'm not sure about the benefices of updating to the latest SVN revision,
> but I think there might be some notable improvements, they write about
> stability, performance, and better game compatibility.
>
> So as the maintainer of dosbox, I was wondering if it might be a good idea to
> change the version for a recent SVN revision.
>
>         There are a few difficulties of doing so :
> - 1st. it is hosted on sourceforge, there are no tags, and there is no way of
> getting a tarball of a specific revision, so I can't make an easy slackbuild
> with a download URL, a md5sum and say "here goes dosbox-0.74-r4055". Except if I
> could create such a tarball and host it on slackbuild, which may be a solution.
>
> - 2nd. as those are SVN builds, I can't really know which one to choose, what if
> I choose a broken one ? I guess it might be as simple as updating the saved
> tarball, and version number, but it doesn't seem to follow the slackware
> philosophy of having a solid though up-to-date system. I'd go a bit blind there
> hoping for the best. Maybe I should add a dosbox-svn slackbuild specifically for
> non-releases versions ?
>
> - 3rd. as it would be by definition of unknown stability, it would be best if it
> were easy for builders to try out a different revision, even the latest at any
> time, without having to ask me for it, and waiting for a tarball being uploaded,
> etc. all that without knowing if it would work better. And it is not really hard
> to simply clone the SVN repository, and update to any given revision, then build
> a dosbox-0.74.revision package. But is it something we would be doing inside a
> slackbuild ? And if the slackbuild doest that (svn checkout && svn update
> -r $revision), there wouldn't be any download links inside the dosbox.info file,
> how would third party software like sbotools handle that ?
>
> - 4th. sourceforge being as shitty as it is, there also isn't a download link
> available for getting the latest revision. Snapshots are only available for the
> latest revision, but the revision number is inside the URL, and older snapshots
> are removed and inaccessible. I could download some sort of dosbox-latest, and
> extract the revision number, and create a latest package with the right version,
> which could also mess up with sbotools and the likes (I don't really know).
>
>         As of now, I have a fonctional slackbuild that get a revision number
> (4055 by default which is todays latest) that can be overriden by adding
> REVISION=... on the command line. Then it does a svn checkout && svn update -r
> $REVISION, and creates a package names dosbox-0.74.r$REVISION.
> If REVISION=latest is given, it won't update and instead will get the latest
> revision number from the SVN repository and creates a well formed package with
> the latest revision number in it.
>         The download link is still the dosbox-0.74 official release from 2010,
> and is not used.
>         It compiles fine and works well after a few small tests.
>
>
> So, what should I do about all that ?
>
>
>         Yth.
>
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