[1808] in athena10
Re: Athena delete
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Sun Mar 22 10:16:09 2009
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-Id: <29FD6D41-E68F-4170-B174-5E9F1D5C7CCC@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <1237701961.23178.9.camel@balanced-tree>
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Date: Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:15:06 -0400
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On Mar 22, 2009, at 2:06 AM, Anders Kaseorg wrote:
> I’m not sure who jik is, and I don’t really like the tone of his
> request
> that we add an RPM specfile to our source tree (plus I’m already not
> so
> happy that we added debian directories there; software _should_ be
> separable from its packaging), but his patches might be worth looking
> at.
As Kevin pointed out, jik wrote delete, so I think it's reasonable for
us to take patches from the original author of the package.
Addressing the general case, I'm not sure how the presence of a debian
directory or spec file implies that the software is not separable from
its packaging. I can think of several packages that ship with spec
files and/or debian directories for easy packaging. The software will
build just fine with out them, you just can't type "make rpm" unless
you're on Redhat, or "make dpkg" unless you're on Debian. For
example, the upstream source for lprng (lprng-3.8.28dfsg.1 on my stock
Hardy machine) includes a DISTRIBUTIONS subdirectory, containing the
metadata necessary to build an RPM, a Solaris.pkg, and a FreeBSD
port. If you don't wany any of those things, you simply don't CD into
that directory - nothing in the main source tree depends on it.
I can see a downside, in that if we provide a spec file, perhaps we're
obligated to maintain and test it, which we may not want to be in the
business of doing. On the other hand, I think it's inevitable that
Debathena will eventually make its way to other platforms or
distributions (Fedora and OS X come to mind), so perhaps we want to
address this issue now. If the debian directories were not in the
source tree, where would they be and what would the build process look
like? If they live elsewhere, could RPM spec files and, say, OS X
package metadata live there too?
-Jon
