Re: cmdliner 1.0.0 uses topkg for building

[Hendrik Tews <hendrik@askra.de>]

Everybody,

I am a bit shocked that my simple question about how to best
package topkg and topkg-care lead to such a heated and quite
personal discussion. I would rather prefer to have a friendly and
constructive relation to our upstream providers and to base
discussions on technical arguments. More often than not upstream
providers will -often for good reason- not be convinced by our
arguments.

Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch> writes:

> On 18 July 2017 at 10:42:51, Hendrik Tews (hendrik@askra.de) wrote:
>
>> Preparing Debian packages would of course be much more
>> straightforward, if topkg and
>> topkg-care would not share the same source tarball ;-)
>
> I am a bit curious on why this is the case exactly. What kind of
> difficulties does it specifically bring ?

The "much more straightforward" was certainly an exaggeration. I
should have written "easier for me" instead.

The difficulty is just that I have not yet encountered a
situation that we have with topkg and topkg-care and that I don't
know yet what would be the preferred way to package both.

> In any case I suspect packaging topkg-care is not going to be useful

I thought topkg-care is needed to run the tests, for instance,
for cmdliner? If I am not mixing things up here, then it would
certainly be interesting to package topkg-care eventually to
enable Debian continuous integration to run these tests too.

But I agree that it is much more urgent to package topkg.

> More generally. Always feel free to ping me in when you encounter

Thanks a lot, this is certainly appreciated!

> It would somehow be sad if all this work was not able to
> simplify the work of system packagers downstream by being able to
> semi-automate the creation of your packages via cuts in the package
> universe of the OCaml opam repository.

I also expect that packaging opam packages for Debian should be
simpler, but I have no experience yet. I also thought about
automation already, but I first need some manual experience.

Best regards,

Hendrik