On Mon, Apr 01, 2019 at 08:15:39PM +0200, Jonathan Carter wrote:
> 3. Make APT more competitive
mmdebstrap (a debootstrap alternative) is a lovely example of putting
APT into a field it wasn't initially created for and run with it: Now,
wrap a GUI around it, make it bootstrap a chroot in your user space,
install mc and drop some shellscript into ~/bin to add it to your path.
Done. Mostly. Sort-of.
So, assuming we accept this as a prototype, lets assume we want to have
APT enter this field proper: there is a bunch of stuff to do, but
thankfully (or sadly) most of it is outside the scope of APT and
involves all of Debian (and to a point upstreams) in many rather
technical battlefields potentially out of scope for the DPL, but there
is one thing which while we have rough consensus in Debian that
something should be done, there is no concerted directed effort, so we
might benefit from the DPL driving the thing. I am talking of course
about …
The abolishment¹ of maintainer scripts in deb packages
I took the liberty to ghost write you a little speech for the occasion,
feel free (any of you) to use if you see fit:
"We choose to abolish maintainerscript in this decade and do the other
things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because
that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies
and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,
one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win"
(similarities with other bold speeches is pure happenstance of course)
The benefits are too plentiful to be fully enumerated, but beside this
apt-home thing you can use it e.g. in (cross)bootstrapping, better and
easier testing and packaging itself becomes easier as well!
(While that mail was written yesterday, I feared people would get the
idea I would be joking. I am not, well, except the speech part).
Moo,
David Kalnischkies
¹ with an exception for the 1% of packages which actually really need it
and are deploying DPKG_ROOT at least. The rest should really make due
with declarations of what it needs rather than buggy imperative scripts.
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