Bug#688896: Bad idea?
Hi Colin,
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On Sat, Jul 06, 2013 at 11:10:21PM +0200, Colin Alston wrote:
> Wouter, is it your stance that people cannot produce a competing tool to dpkg
> and be included in Debian?
Not necessarily. I understand that no code is perfect, and sometimes it
may be a good idea to reimplement something from scratch in order to
produce something better. If the goal is to replace dpkg with "something
better", then it may make sense, for a while, to temporarily have the
competing tool in Debian so that people can test it, before replacing
dpkg.
However, that is not what fpm is. Instead, fpm is a tool to convert
packages from one format to another. That, itself, is not necessarily a
bad idea either; case in point, we do have a package in Debian, "alien",
which provides similar functionality.
What makes fpm a bad idea is that it seems to be based on a stance of
"Debian Policy is just too hard, and I can't be bothered trying to
implement things so they will follow that policy". While I'm not saying
that a tool should necessarily expose all the gory details of Debian
policy to the end user (not everyone wants to build a package for upload
into the archive), such a tool *should* be written in a smart enough way
that where relevant, Debian policy *is* adhered to -- at the very least
by default.
After looking at the code and the documentation, it was my impression
that fpm does not do that; it is, in fact, made in a rather fragile way.
If the author says he believes maintainer scripts are "almost always
poorly written shell scripts that break easily"[1], and combining that
with the fact that parts of Debian's infrastructure require stuff being
called from maintainer scripts in order to do something properly, then
that does not inspire much confidence in the resulting packages.
As such, I don't think putting fpm into Debian is a good idea.
[1]
<https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/11TOsLeg58w7GCt6i7y1VIQWnUYotsx0MzGMJ_dWUJNo/edit?pli=1#slide=id.i146>,
slide 24
--
This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space.
If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you
will not go to space today.
-- http://xkcd.com/1133/
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