On 04/15/2016 12:54 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> On 04/15/2016 11:48 AM, R P Herrold wrote:
>> as well as a well documented, and solved problem with the buildsystem 
>> which EPEL uses (I was perhaps too eliptical yesterday), and thus my 
>> dis-interest in re-inventing or re-documenting this wheel ** yet 
>> again ** -- Russ herrold 
>
> Thanks for working on this, Russ.  While reinventing the wheel is 
> frowned upon most of the time, there are settings where reinventing 
> wheels should be encouraged, particularly the educational setting. 
> Sometimes it is worthwhile to do some calculations by hand or by slide 
> rule, then go back to the calculators and spreadsheets; the act of 
> reinventing enhances the understanding of why things are done the way 
> that they are done. You better appreciate koji if you build your own 
> mini-beehive.
>
> For most of us, though, it's just a time sink.  Yasha is in a 
> different environment than most of us.
I may be in a university environment, but we do not waste time 
reinventing the wheel for research or research support activities -- and 
neither does any other viable research group.  However, it was my 
understanding that the EPEL or other similar automata are not readily 
available -- for deploying production code through porting there is no 
reason not to use an existing "automaton" that can resolve dependencies 
(I recall a correspondent referring to these sorts of things as 
:dependency hell") from whatever source code repositories as required 
and ultimately build a working executable application.   At the moment, 
my group does not have a porting machine that we could dedicate to this 
sort of problem.  This is not an issue of "critical thinking", etc., but 
rather pure technological implementation.  However, the development of 
that technology does require a variety of "critical thinking" 
activities.  I definitely do not want to get into the repo "business" at 
this time -- we do not have the resources that we can spare from other 
activities, and are not likely to get the necessary external funding to 
become a repo development "house".  But -- I would very much like a 
working SL7 binary executable of a reasonably current Abiword.

Yasha Karant