Re: pros/cons of installing from source
On 5/4/07, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 12:42:40PM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 10:34:27AM -0600, Javier Vasquez wrote:
[heavy snippage dude]
> >
> > You mentioned debian commitment to FSF and its social contract, as
> > very good reasons by themselves to run debian. I totally agree.
> > However debian is not the only distro with such commitment. Actually
> > sourceMage picked debian social contract and modified it a bit...
> snip...
>
> I understand Greg's comments to be about Debian's commitment to
> enforcing a packaging policy, i.e. a policy on where and how things
> are installed. To me is quite a different thing than a social
> policy. In Debian, if the install scripts of a package to not put
> things where the policy says they should be _that_ is a bug in the
> package. It may also be considered a bug in some other distro.s. I've
> not kept track of this sort of policy issue in any other distro. since
> I discovered Debian.
>
> The Social Policy is also good. But I think it is easy to feel good
> about a Social Policy, and it is hard work to implement a packaging
> policy.
I think that the packaging policy is what really sets debian
apart. THat's why everything "just works"... because dev's can count
on things being a certain way and if its not, they can count on it
being fixed.
A
Hmm, OK, we're changing the original topic now, but it's OK. I didn't
want to comment more, but I think there's a confusion here. On a
binary distribution you required a packaging policy, since you have
different package developers, and in order to keep a coherent
functional and robust system (dependencies, etc), you need to enforce
a packaging policy. Debian packaging policy has demonstrated to me by
far to be the best (personal opinion here), and not now, almost from
the very beginning.
However on a source based distribution, there's no different package
developers, the admin of the system is the developer at the same time,
and he/she is the one deciding what to compile against (libraries,
dependencies whether strict or optional, etc). Furthermore,
sourceMage, and probably other source based distros also have their
own packaging policies. In sourceMage for example the "spells",
include a section for dependencies, just like in debian, and the
required dependencies by upstream are included there. Beyond that
there are 2 release branches, one stable, and the other testing, plus
a development environment. Nothing goes to "stable" if the testing
community is not satisfied about it.
I think there's no way to compare packaging policy between a binary
distro and a source based one. The philosophy is completely
different. On a binary distro the policy is enforced to the distro
package developers, while on a source based one the developer is
oneself, and even considering that, there are policies enforced by the
original application developer which are enforced... Remember that
it's not entirely correct to compare oranges against apples.
--
Javier
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