Hi Clint,

On 15 November 2012 03:53, Clint Byrum <cl...@ubuntu.com> wrote:

> https://launchpad.net/pkgme
>
> At one point I was interested in writing a ruby backend for this, but
> got distracted and moved to other focus, but I think it solves what you
> are talking about, without need to develop a large project like a GUI.


I have been keeping an eye on pkgme, but I'm not sure it solves the
problem. My concern with automated tools is that they tend to to work for
about 75% of stuff, but there's always a substantial proportion of things
that just do something a little bit odd, and the automatic tool can't
handle them. So I have to understand what the automation is doing, to deal
with the things it can't do for me.

To give more concrete examples, we have stdeb for Python packages, and
debhelper, which can guess much of the standard process of building a
package (such as running 'make' or 'setup.py'). But neither can handle
enough real-world cases that new packagers can use it without thinking
about what's happening.

I tried writing an application with Quickly a couple of months ago, and I
was impressed with how well 'quickly package' (which uses pkgme) worked.
But a lot of things that I'd like to see packaged aren't developed with
Quickly, and I'm not confident that pkgme can do such a good job with them.

Thanks,
Thomas

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