On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 12:35:49AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Sep 21, Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be> wrote:
> > > I object to an hard requirement, and I also object to the general idea.
> > > It's not like there are hundred of different packaging scripts, so we
> > > would end up with hundred of similar three-lines README.source files.
> >
> > Perhaps my judgement was clouded by the fact that dbs-alike scripts
> > aren't synchronized yet; however, at the time I reported this bug, there
> > were at least a number of (incompatible) dbs-alike scripts out there.
> This is not important, maintainers just need to add an alias target to
> debian/rules.
> *Way* easier to maintain and use for everybody involved than writing a
> natural language description of the operations involved.
>
> > The fact that there is now cdbs (which is gaining more adoption, and is
> > slowly but surely replacing the older variants) does indeed help. In any
> > case, if the packages that use such packaging schemes could come to an
> > agreement without having to go through policy, that would indeed even be
> > better.
> All my packages use the "unpack" target because somebody once opened a
> bug saying this was a de facto standard. (I did not bother to check.)
Right.
When starting this proposal, I didn't aim for overdocumentation or
anything similar; I was just fed up with the fact that the Debian source
package format allows one to just 'apt-get source foo; cd
foo-<version>', and start hacking, which obviously is a good thing.
Dbs and other things broke this assumption; because of incompatibilities
among different dbs-alike implementations, you had to dig through an
awful amount of makefiles -- which is not impossible, just an annoyance.
Because I wanted to restore the ability to just go ahead and look at the
source without having to care about packaging details, I started this
proposal.
There have been oppositions to my original idea of mandating a common
name. I accepted the suggestion of using a documentation file to restore
this assumption, but that seems to meet some opposition as well.
Fact is, I don't actually care how the problem is solved, as long as it
is solved. As there obviously are a number of people who do care,
though, I'll just step back here and let those other people handle it --
but please /do/ take care of it. Having something which can be easily
edited is a virtue, and we should make that equally possible within the
entirety of Debian again.
--
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-- with thanks to fortune
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