Re: FPM in Debian archive [Was: Re: Bug#704686: ITP: ruby-arr-pm -- RPM reader and writer Ruby library]
On Thu, 2013-04-11 at 11:50:35 +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
> > Jon Dowland wrote:
> > >Hi Laurent, thanks for the clarification â?? to ask a related
> > >question. What's the worth of FPM on Debian? Especially given the
> > >issues that Wouter has raised in the bug¹
> > >
> > >¹ http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=22;bug=688896
> >
> > Quite, I'm concerned on that front too. Do we want to encourage or
> > make it easier for people to use tools that don't care about our
> > packaging policies?
>
> I would confess that I'm mainly using it to create RPM's at work. For
> some users it's easier (and faster) to use fpm than starting to dig into
> a specfile or a debian package.
>
> We already have checkinstall in the archive. The main difference here
> with checkinstall is that fpm allows to package easily a complete tree,
> I think that checkinstall requires some kind of 'make install' as it's
> diverting some syscalls to track which files are installed. I know
> nothing about the quality/policy compliance of the .deb generated by
> checkinstall.
>
> I've opened a bug on the upstream bug tracker about using dpkg instead
> of ar/tar directly.
Well TBH, an upstream that's creating a program to package stuff that
cannot be bothered to read documentation about how stuff is done
properly (because "you don't have time for this crap" [0]), does not
inspire any confidence...
There's other problematic stuff though, like hardcoded shared library
dependencies w/o using dpkg-shlibdeps, or the injection of maintainer
scripts to add ldconfig calls, that I've spotted after a very quick
check.
[0] <http://goo.gl/sWs3Z> (slides 17, 18)
<https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm> (section "The Solution - FPM")
Thanks to Wouter for pointing this out on debian-policy [1]
[1] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2013/01/msg00081.html>
Thanks,
Guillem
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