1 Apr
2009
1 Apr
'09
4:58 p.m.
Fraser <fraser(a)arkhostings.com> writes:
Grammostola Rosea wrote:
TBH, I don't think upstream should be bugged to provide proper
packaging. I think both users and packagers benefit much more from
a proper (and flexible) build system.
I suggest add a 'chapter' in the wiki of
linuxaudio.org with
information about maintaining packages. The information about
Debian/Ubuntu you can find in my link. But I can imagine that also
other distro's like to write down some information about maintaining
multimedia packages, cause it would be nice if we could improve GNU/
Linux audio by getting more packages into the different distro's.
A thought to consider - when I embarked upon creating debian and ubuntu
packages of my own software, I found very little in the way of guides to
assist a developer, the guides are focused on maintaining someone else's
software (often already packaged).
It can't hurt to educate developers on how to
assemble packages for
their own software, just making them aware of what's required will lead
to reduced effort to package and the ones who chose to include the
debian build files in the source shift the maintainer effort to quality
control type role (hopefully fed back to the developer to include).
This leads IME to frustration to both upstreams and packagers.
Debianizing a package is intrinsicly a non-trivial tasks which is almost
allways done wrong in the first place. So instead of duplicating the
packaging work, it's IMO better to not have that upstream at all.
FWIW, I even tend to remove the debian/ dirs from upstream tarballs to
make it clear that the package was packaged independent. Worse, there
are technical implications due to the debian source package format,
where leaving the debian/ dir in place can lead to real problems.
--
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4