On Sat, 2003-03-08 at 21:43, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote: > On Sat, Mar 08, 2003 at 02:03:23PM -0600, Graham Wilson wrote: > > > i frequently see in am summaries that am's ask prospective developers > > to package something without debhelper. why is this? > I guess it's the same reasoning behind having a student solve an ODE > "by hand" instead of using a Laplace transform (where applicable). The > later will be probably easier, but the former will let the teacher see > that the stundent "understands" what's going on (not really). By this > kind of reasoning, asking the NM to create a package using nothing but > tar, ar and other common Unix utilities would be a fair question (I'd > be surprised if more than 1% of the developers could do it). > Amusingly, I only originally learnt how to package without debhelper because I had to learn how to create debs with just tar, ar and friends -- we have a custom package builder at work, and I had to port it to Debian. After finding out exactly how debs were built without even dpkg-dev, I quickly found out what all the other bits did -- notably debhelper. Of course, all my maintained packages use debhelper, I'm not a masochist. Personally I don't think that asking an NM to repackage something without debhelper is fair, I don't think they really will learn anything from it other than "debhelper is not the lowest level". And packaging without debhelper DOES make it harder for the package to be adopted later. Scott -- Scott James Remnant Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange http://netsplit.com/ things happen? Are you going round the twist?
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