[LAD] Releasing source code is not enough, I think...

[Brendan Jones]

On 01/21/2014 01:40 PM, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 05:55:04AM +0000, Filipe Coelho wrote:
>
>> I think we should stop assuming releasing source code is enough.
>
> Enough for what ? Users who don't want to install from source
> want packages made for the package manager of their distro,
> which will take care of dependencies etc. You can't expcect a
> developer to provide such packages for each and every distro.
> I don't even provide them for the distro I use myself.

Exactly. "Releasing source code is not enough". Again exactly.

If you want downstream maintainers/packagers to do the hard work in 
producing trusted binaries so that you will never get an email about why 
won't this build again, there's a few things you can do:

  - be a absolutely clear in your licensing. the upstream author of this 
plugin sent me an email and said I can use this code is not good enough

  - don't bundle libraries. It's lazy and its insecure insecure. If 
upstream has a major problem with you - fork it. Look at ntk for an example.

  - become a package maintainer, you are doing all the hard work anyway

kxStudio would be great in Fedora ;)

If people don't know how to find devel packages then they shouldn't be 
compiling software. The fact that the need to is a mistake.

I really recommend that people should really petition their distros 
first before trying to build the latest release themselves. Encourage 
users to file bugs to both distro and/or maintainer. More often than not 
the downstream packager does not even realize a new version exists. I'm 
maintaining >100 Fedora audio packages and it is hard to keep up.

Brendan