Re: Difficult Packaging Practices
Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:
> I think it's a combination of a lot of things. We have high standards,
> a lot of complexity, and you have to get most or all of that right to
> contribute. You have to have a package that meets our standards. You
> have to have a copyright file that meets our standards. You have to be
> able to figure out our processes. You have to be willing to follow our
> processes. And you eventually have to deal with the PGP mess.
> If you don't find value in the things where we have high standards,
> Debian doesn't make a lot of sense. If you just want to get upstream's
> idea of their package onto a system with their release schedule and
> their recommended dependency versions, there are better ways than
> getting a package into Debian.
This is my experience as well. I've occasionally tried to get people at
work (at various jobs) interested in packaging software for Debian,
without all that much success. The problem seems less any one specific
thing and more that they're perfectly content with a Debian package
created by running fpm on some install tree, and don't see the point in
doing any more work than that. This is usually in the context where
there's some other config management system in use, so to them all the
packaging format is good for is as a container of files with a version
number attached.
It's not that they don't understand the merits of having what they think
of as the base operating system properly maintained and integrated; it's
more that they don't see any value in doing that work for the incremental
thing that they're adding. They cobble together some combination of local
config management and a deployment method until it works and then move on
to some (from their perspective) more interesting problem.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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