[Nickle]Nickle 2.00 .deb, RPM available

[Michael Cahill]

Hi Bart,

I'm Michael Cahill - I've been a Nickle user for a while now,
but a quiet one. I've been using Nickle to play with some ideas
in number theory and factorisation.

> I've made a nickle 2.00 .deb and RPM available at
> http://nickle.org/~bart .  If folks want to try these out,
> that's great.  I've also made some slight changes to the RPM
> build process to make this work better.  Keith will have to
> validate those, and hopefully will update the web page
> appropriately at that point.

I'm running Mandrake 8.0 and 8.1, and I gave your RPM a spin.
There was a version mismatch with readline (Mandrake ships
with readline version 4.x), so I tried to build an RPM from
the CVS tree. I encountered a few problems because I'm not
on a Redhat system, but the little changes I've made might
be helpful.

Firstly, I found that automake was uncooperative about copying
some of the missing files into the nickle-2.00 directory as
they exist in the parent - e.g., install-sh. This can be fixed
by telling automake only to look in the current directory:

--- configure.in        Mon Oct 22 10:11:54 2001
+++ nickle-2.00/configure.in    Sat Oct 27 16:56:24 2001
@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@
 AC_INIT(nickle.h)
 AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(nickle,2.00)
 AM_CONFIG_HEADER(config.h)
+AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR(.)
 
 dnl Checks for programs.
 AC_PROG_CC


The next issue was that the build-rpm script assumes that the
RPM build area is in /usr/src/redhat. On my system it's
/usr/src/RPM. The simplest way around this seems to be to change
build-rpm to the following:

#!/bin/sh
VERSION=`egrep AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE configure.in | sed -e 's/^.*,//' -e 's/).*$//'`
echo "Building nickle $VERSION RPM..." >&2
cvs export -D now -d nickle-$VERSION nickle
(cd nickle-$VERSION && sh ./autoconfigure.sh)
sed "s/VERSION/$VERSION/g" < nickle.spec > nickle-$VERSION/nickle.spec
tar cjf nickle-$VERSION.tar.bz2 nickle-$VERSION
rpm -tb nickle-$VERSION.tar.bz2

This uses rpm's '-t' method to build from a tar file, which gets
around needing to know where the RPM directory is (also note the
reordering so that the right spec file ends up in the archive).

Hope this helps - I'm all in favor of getting nickle into wider
use.

Michael.