On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 05:03:25PM +0200, Gergely Nagy wrote:
> I maintain my view that to learn packaging, the best way to do that is
> to start from scratch
I agree, but the request posted to this list was not about *learning*
packaging. Rather, it reads:
> I would like to make very simple Debian package to install very simple
> file on my system, only static file, like documentation.
Now, we can of course say to users advancing such a request "we won't
let you; either you actually learn to do packaging, or you keep your
static files around, unpackaged, on your system". I personally have
sympathies for users that are not (yet?) up to packaging stuff properly,
but still want a way to ship stuff on their machine in a way that makes
it known to the packaging system. It seems to me that they are willing
to do the right thing™, even though they are not able to commit to full
blown packaging.
People facing that specific use case would probably give up if they had
to learn full blown packaging. Anyone should judge by themselves whether
giving up in those use cases is better or worse than packaging using
some heavy packaging wrapper such as those mentioned in this thread.
There is a point, however, in saying that those wrappers should provide
all the needed information to switch to proper packaging when the user
stumble upon scenarios not supported by the wrappers. (In my personal
experience: a user introduced to equivs has been very happy in the
beginning to use it and have them took the time to learn full blown
packaging after discovering equivs limitation. I cannot say whether he
would have reached that point if she hasn't had a intermediate "easy"
tool to use.)
Cheers.
[ yes: we're probably quite offtopic for -devel ]
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
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Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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