Ondrej Sury wrote:
Sorry, but in DEB world, this is pretty normal to have separate upstream source and debian/ subdirectory and it's not serious pain at all.
Exactly, it's normal in the debian world, but it's not normal in the rpm world.
Each packaging system has it's own "default" way of handling packaging. In the case of RPM, it's "rpmbuild --rebuild yyy.src.rpm", or "rpmbuild -tb yyy.tar.gz". Debian does it differently, just like Solaris pkg does it differently, but it makes no difference.
I have in the past wasted *hours* of time because the packager of an RPM expected the user to "just know" that their package had some weird custom process of producing an RPM, and when this was posted as a bug the answer was "oh, you should have read the documentation".
I had read the documentation: the rpm man page, which clearly details the --rebuild and -tX options.
With packaging, the needs of the users come first, the needs of the packager comes second. Sure, it will be nice and neat for packagers to have packaging scripts in a single archive, but that's a pain for the end user.
Upstream and packagers work in clearly separated and in my view it's good. But my view can be twisted since there are propably a bit different *standards* how is package provided in DEB and RPM world, ie. debianers are not used to compile packages themselves a lot, they use packages provided by their distribution.
Virtually all distros offer a somewhat conservative approach to packaging - they are typically a few versions behind, and there are good reasons for this.
Sometimes however, someone might need a bleeding edge feature not offered by a distro, but they might not want to clutter up their system with "custom" install trees. The ASF packages serve the needs of this group of people.
Regards, Graham --
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