Hi! On Sat, 2013-04-20 at 11:05:29 -0700, Clint Byrum wrote: > [...]. IMO this is why upstream packaging should be > embraced and enhanced rather than focusing on dpkg.
I'm not sure if you refer to the tool here, or to the packaging work, doesn't change much anyway. > I once worked on the 'pkgme' project for Ubuntu and there have been > others, but never followed through. The idea was just to build > debian source packages from upstream sources. Upstreams should be > able to release a package which serves their needs, and Debian > should be able to consume these almost directly. Respectfully, I think you've entirely missed the point of a distribution (and sadly I'm seeing this trend more often than before now, with all the hype around app stores and similar...). Packaging and maintaining a consistent and unified distribution cannot be delegated to upstreams (and I'm talking as an upstream developer here too), because that entails a bit more than slapping some files somewhere, tarring the thing up and calling it a day. Building a nice distribution requires a high-level view and QA of the entire system; requires curating sane namespaces, be them on the package/project names, on the version strings, on the filesystem (by avoiding file collisions, using alternatives or diversions), on exposed programming interfaces, etc; requires making sure a diverse set of programs interact correctly with each other; performing security updates; ideally keeping single runtime versions; doing global transitions to use other or newer runtimes, programs, libraries or packages; an unified way to build from sources to cope with the endless and interesting different upstream build systems; porting and building for different binary architectures, not just what upstream might have around; documentation; translation; tagging stuff with metadata to allow for easy searches; excision of the embedded code copies cancer; even stuff like how the Delete and Backspace keys should behave; sets a qualify bar for upstream projects, stuff of low quality will not be accepted most of the time; license checks; etc, etc... And all this, upstream will never be able to provide (at least not as defaults), because each distribution has its own policies, some are better, some are worse, and some are just different. In general I'd never trust the packaging produced by an upstream for a distribution they are not involved in. But most of the time there will be no such packages for the desired distribution anyway. Although there's been work on creating distribution-neutral specs that some upstreams have picked up, there's always going to be something new, the specs will just not cover all needed things, the specs might not be liked by some/many people, or might not have been fully adopted by all upstreams. A distribution (any, most) is the gel that binds and gives an unified and coherent shape to the software ecosystem. An app store is just like a scrapyard, you might find magnificent and isolated gems there, but most of it will probably be junk, or not combine with the other scrap parts. Also if people thought that distributions are unneeded, then the amount of them would reflect that, or start decreasing, which I'm not seeing. Distributions will exist as long as there's FLOSS, because by its decentralized nature, there's no single coordination point; people who are distraught by the amount of distributions or by their mere existence might probably only be able to find peace in closed-systems instead, with their centralized control points. > Where Debian's efforts should be focused is on things like license > verification and helping bug reports and fixes get to upstream. So basically, getting rid of most of the fun stuff and turning it into a lawyerish play-ground and support center... I'd venture to say, not the most attractive work for most people here if it was the only thing to be done, which we do because we think it's important non the less. Regards, Guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130424194348.ga32...@gaara.hadrons.org
