Mercury in Debian 1.3

[Tyson Richard DOWD]

I don't know whether others are aware of this.

Debian 1.3 (a popular Linux distribution) was released on the 2nd of
June.  It appears Mercury 0.6.1 has been packaged into a Debian package.
It is one of the standard packages in Debian 1.3 (that is, it's in
the supported packages, along with tk and gcc, etc). This is slightly
problematic, as it has been called 0.6.2, but it is unlikely to cause
any confusion, since the only 0.6.2 we have released is a Windows
binary release.

Mostly this is good news: it will be distributed on CDs everywhere (we
can probably expect tens, if not hundreds of thousands of CDs with
Mercury on them to be distributed -- not that everyone will install it of
course). And users of other Linux distributions will probably be able to
use it too, since most of them support cross-distribution installation
programs now, or will soon (eg RedHat can install Debian packages).

A couple of issues arise from this, however:

	- We should probably mention this on the web page, and in the
	  release notes for the next release.
	- Diffs have been made to the distribution source in order to
	  get it to install correctly, and debianify it. These are not
	  major (mainly renaming `mc' to `mercury', as `mc' has long
	  been the name for the Linux Midnite Commander program, and is
	  also used for Modula compiler).
	  We should probably integrate these diffs back into the main
	  sources as best we can.
	- We may want to release our own Debian package with the next
	  release, or work with the packager:
		  Milan Zamazal <pdm at fi.muni.cz>

The package is at:
http://www.debian.org/Packages/dist/devel/mercury.html

The diffs are at:
ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/stable/source/devel/mercury_0.6.2-1.diff.gz

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't eveyone's cup of
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        #  fur.
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #