[Gpg4win-devel] claws extensions

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Mittwoch, 29. Oktober 2008, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > It seems that with WiX and mono it may be possible to build MSI
> > installers on GNU/Linux.
>
> This is not correct.  You would need at least WiX, mono, and msi.dll, a
> proprietary Microsoft platform DLL used by WiX.  There may be other DLL
> dependencies I don't know about.  To my knowledge, WiX needs this DLL to
> build the installer.

Hmm, do you just need the msi.dll to be present or do you need it to be 
runable (via Wine or Windows)?
I might have missunderstood some of the explanations I've got about WiX.

> But note that last time I checked, mono did not run WiX.

That is something that could be fixed, possibly.

> This issue is, IMO, not about "building stuff on GNU/Linux", but about
> freedom and control over the software toolchain.

The point Colin made was about building stuff on GNU/Linux in particular
and for some other use case it is just this. Like easier distributed building
and faster building.

> This means that the 
> software stack must be freely licensed, but in practice it also should be
> approachable.  A different way to say the same thing: Software freedom is
> not just a check-box requirement. 
> Sustainable solutions require a functioning ecosystem.  

Goes all without saying. Still practice always requires compromisses
to be useful. Just think of FSF using proprietary operating systems
in the beginning. I think that was completeley okay, because it was
for the first part of a larger road in the right direction.

> In the free software world, NSIS+mingw32 is such an
> ecosystem, while mono+wix would not be, even if it would work technically.

Okay, there is that msi.dll, but this could be considered the operating
system where the packages runs to some degree. If wix+mono can run on 
GNU/Linux, I do not see why this is not such an ecosystem (yet).

>  In particular, to my knowledge WiX is not part of any of  GNU/Linux
> distribution.

A minor practical drawback, yes.
Could be changed, as it is Free Software as far as I know.

Bernhard

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