LibreCAD packaging for Fedora and RHEL-type systems
(RHEL = Red Hat Enterprise Linux™ which as a family includes Scientific Linux, CentOS and others.
These sytems are derived from the same overall upstream project, Fedora.)

Downloads

LibreCAD v1.0.0rc3:

LibreCAD v1.0.0rc2

The .spec file

Repo
NOTE: This repository will be deprecated once LibreCAD v1.0 is released and included in the main Fedora and EPEL repositories.

If you're bored and know a thing or two about rpm packaging on Fedora or EPEL please give the spec file a review and tell me what to fix about it, or how to make it more simple.

If you're really bored, give the build scripts for qmake and make a look and give me some feedback. Building for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux may have things more complicated than they need be -- any simplifications (even Linux specific) are welcome.

2011.09.29

So the rc3 push came a little late. There were a few complications due mostly to a few accidential regressions here and there. Fortunately we caught them and they've been fixed.

More fun than regression problems are the new features. Most interesting of the new inclusions is the new snap tool. The snap system has been revised to work in a toggle-by-feature sort of way, so you can combine elements of different snap tools to get interesting (but predictable) behavior -- which is awesome.
Thanks for that go to youarefunny and dxli.

This release is a tad buggy in funny ways. Claude is busy documenting the bugs so that dxli and Rallaz can get to fixing them. Unfortunately I've got too many things keeping me busy at the moment to do much bug chasing (ries is also pretty busy at the moment himself), but documenting them is critical to keeping development moving the right direction, so if you catch some bugs and you have a SourceForge account please stop by and note them so everyone can get working on them.

2011.09.26

As of today the links are not merely present, they actually lead somewhere. I've added builds for Fedora 14, 15 and 16. I am confident that the SRPM will build just fine on architectures such as PPC and s390, but simply won't have a test system available until I run it through Koji at Fedora later on.

I couldn't get the builds to go correctly on EPEL 4 or 5 environments. It would be worthwhile to try running the executable on RHEL 4/5 or SL 4/5 and see how things turn out.

2011.09.25

I'm sure I'll think of something profound to say here if I just sit and think long enough...
...or not. I simply don't have any news related to packaging for Fedora or EPEL right now.

If you're hunting for more general project news, hop over to the real project page or if you want to watch the digital pot boil firsthand, take a look at the GitHub site and activity trackers.

Why this page?

LibreCAD is the most exciting thing happening in open source CAD development today. Unfortunately it is not quite up to the project leader's standard for release just yet, but it is already a wonderfully useful program. Along with it not quite being ready for major release some of the compilation details make packaging an rpm up to the standards required by the Fedora community a bit of a pain. The rapid pace of current development also makes packaging for a serious distro like Fedora a bit of a pain (read as "more confusion than I currently have time for"). Instead of pushing for inclusion in Fedora and EPEL just yet, I decided to roll some independent packages for EPEL 6 and various versions of Fedora in the meantime.

But there are already LibreCAD packages for Debian and Ubuntu... and even some rpms for SuSE and [system X]!
I know. There are. The standards for things like FHS compliance and spec file writing are a bit more strict/clash with other distro styles and I sincerely do not feel that LibreCAD is quite ready for Fedora or EPEL just yet. If you feel differently, feel free to go become a Fedora package maintainer and push through the review process now.

Why is this part of the site so ugly?

Because I made it by hand in a text editor, writing very little html markup in the process. I did this for a few reasons:

  1. It feels a lot like "just typing" -- enough so that I don't really care to extend one of my CMSs to fill this area
  2. This area will only be active until LibreCAD is included in Fedora and EPEL
  3. I am too busy to worry with anything more flashy and dynamic at the moment
  4. This is actually much easier to read in a text browser like Lynx or eLinks (the way many admins wind up finding it) or older phone browser than something served by a CMS
  5. Changing a CMS theme somewhere else could have disasterous effects on the text-browser readability of this area without my realizing it until much later
  6. These days the consumer world is so thrilled by retro styles (that is: silly used clothes, long men's hair, the unstudied blathering about Che or wearing his shirt, even an anti-war movement that has very little to do with any current wars, etc.) that I figured this would be a smash hit on the web -- Whoa! Retro!
  7. The first version of this page was written in vi during an ssh session, so I just kept rolling with it...
Meh. 7 reasons is enough, even if slightly contrived to fill 7.

Why is your version number 1.0.0rcX but your package version number 0.0.X?

And finally, a good question.

I did not label the LibreCAD package version 1.0.0rc[whatever] because this gets in the way of package version control. Having letters at the end of your version numbers can confuse a package management system because "rc" isn't really part of a release number series, is it? For example, the package management software doesn't accept the word "version" in the file name and key off of it, instead most of them accept [package-name].[arch].[version] or some similar pattern and react that way. If they don't key off the word "version" then what would make one think they key off random letters like "rc"? A package name of "librecad-1.0.0rc2-el6.i686.rpm" doesn't tell the package manager the right thing, as "1.0.0rc2" could look like it is actually newer (that is, further along in precedence) than "1.0.0", which is wrong. To get around this requires some fanagling with the order and placement of the package name elements -- and Fedora has a system for this -- but if I follow that system here, and someone else goes to the trouble of really packaging LibreCAD for Fedora or EPEL before the actual v1.0 release then my repo will conflict or compete with their proper version numbers. Much easier for me to just arbitrarily invent a "0.0.X" release series here and be certain that anybody's distro package will take precedence over mine.

This whole repo is really only supposed to be active for a short time anyway...

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