Bug#688896: Bad idea?

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be> wrote:

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.

That is not what fpm is. Its goal is to be a tool for packaging software from scratch into multiple formats. In general it tackles the issues of deployment and release management which people face in the real world of horizontally scaled software. One thing to consider in requiring dpkg is that fpm might be outputting a .deb but not itself be running on Debian.

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".

And fpm is not even pretending to create packages which will be included into Debian, that's not its use case. That aside however, if there is some explicit part of how fpm works which results in a .deb file which does not conform to "Debian Policy" (whatever that is) then perhaps file a bug as to what the details of that is - just as long as that bug isn't "fpm isn't dpkg".

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.

Well? In my experience too the Debian scripts are poorly maintained and documented worse still - I can't imagine what Joe Public would think. Good software is simple software. Dpkg, dh-make, and all their friends are far from good software, which thus does not inspire my confidence in opinions about new tools from those who wrote them unless they can point to actual technical failures rather than "policy".