On Fri, Oct 02, 2009 at 01:30:58PM +0100, Phil Housley wrote: > > With my Debian package maintainer hat on, I kindly ask you _not_ to do that. > > > > Upstream development and packaging for a distribution are two totally > > separated affairs, and mixing them only leads to huge headaches and > > duplication of efforts. > > I see where you are coming from with that, but for me as a lonely > developer they really aren't separate. I don't want to go the > autotools route, of having a build tool that can also do installs, and > then translating an installation into packages and so on. From my > point of view I'd like to make/download/sync a project, have the build > tool turn it into something I can install, and then use a package > manager to install it.
How is having a build system perform installs a problem? Basically every build system I know of handles both. Building a software and installing it are two strictly related tasks, and it's only natural to have the same piece of software handle both. > Sure, if most devs are like me they won't always be making perfect > packages that go straight into a distro, but they will shift the job > of installing things to something that is good at it. > > I don't see that it can hurt to have package information in the > project itself, even if no distro ever wants to use it. Or am I > missing something there? The problem with having support for making packages inside a build system is that it encourages developers to actually use that support. Making a Debian package is not a straightforward task: there's a lot of things you need to learn before you can make a simple package, one which contains no shared libraries or similar "complicated" stuff. Even assuming making a Debian package out of an upstream source tree was trivial, what about people using other distributions, with different package managemen systems? What about people using a *BSD, or Solaris? Would you, as an upstream maintainer, be prepared to define a recipe for every and each of these different package formats? Wouldn't the time spent doing so best used working on the actual code, instead of a dozen or so build systems, each one with its different rules and conventions? Upstream developers should be able to only care about the code. Distribution-specific issues and quirks are better handled by downstream maintainers. -- Andrea Bolognani <[email protected]> Resistance is futile, you will be garbage collected.
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
_______________________________________________ Vala-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/vala-list
