Bug#688896: Bad idea?

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be> wrote:

However, as a long-time and experienced Debian Developer, I can say that
what dpkg does is not some trivial thing. It's certainly possible to
build a debian package by bypassing all that; but it just feels wrong.
The right way is not to throw away the tools, but to pass the right
options and environment variables to get them to do what you want, and
to use the tools that were built for this.

The thing is this opens a pandora's box of issues. What dpkg does conceptionally most certainly should be trivial, in fact most of the real hard work happens in apt itself. fpm is not without its faults (you can't sign .deb's - bleh), however dpkg has become old and unweildy with various patches and transitions and Debian have done little to actually improve its usability or consistency over the years - only to add an increasing set of policies around submission to patch shortfalls in the format itself. As someone who is also experienced in using the real dpkg tools to create packages, it's a serious pain tracking down /accurate/ information even from the Debian wiki regarding what the correct process is, and often that process breaks down in weird ways when (as an example) something like dhpython2 arbitrarily breaks things like Twisted plugins, and maintaining a tree of control files all the time. This is the very reason fpm exists, so that people can get on with their lives and release their software to multiple distros - otherwise we might as well write Windows software and suffer with MSDN accounts.

In the words of Dijkstra "How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity - in short: what mathematicians call `elegance` - are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure?"