Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Thomas Orgis <thomas-forum AT orgis.org>]

Am Sun, 27 Oct 2013 12:21:02 -0500
schrieb Jeremy Blosser <jblosser-smgl AT firinn.org>: 

> So now we have other distros so ingrained in hacking upstream things to fit
> their ideals that upstream developers actively depend on it.  Awesome.

That's my reaction, yes. I was always aware of source-based distros
being fringe cases for hackers ... but though that upstream consists of
hackers, too.

> Our commitment to our users has been that if they cast a spell they'll get
> the same thing they would if they downloaded that package and installed it
> manually.

... plus some management to prevent things blowing up. Would ignoring
that two spells install the same binaries (same name, at least) be an option?
Since it's not really a conflict, more of a dispute who owns them.

> know what we did different from upstream will create the headache they're
> using us to avoid.

So we need to define "not different from upstream". You say we'll take
"what I'll get when installing the upstream source tarball without
bothering to read extra documentation in there"? I see a point in that;-)

> I would say just tell the thing to install under /opt/spell-$major, libs
> and utils both, so the user gets the whole upstream thing and can sort out
> from there what they want done with it.

> Does this package provide proper pkg-config data such that if it's
> installed in /opt other things have an easy way to find it?

Uh. That means that folks have to add /opt/package/bin to their $PATH
and also /opt/lib/pkgconfig for pkgconfig ... no ... actually this has
to be done for root so that casting dependent spells works. Isn't this
more hassle than it's worth? Unless we stuff the pkgconfig file
into /usr/lib/pkgconfig. Did you mean that?

Bottom line is that i did this upstream-desired split for for lilv-0
and lilv-util. I case we really want to stick to "gimme the whole thing
I get from source", I can change that, of course (do we deprecate
spells that weren't in stable yet?). That spell is really small, so the
trouble is not that big. But I wanted to have it discussed for the
future, when upstream devs increasingly move to that model of mandated
packaging.


Alrighty then,

Thomas

PS: One unfortunate thing I noticed: we got spells named foo-util,
bar-utils, baz-utility ... would have been nice if we had figured out
to use only one of these suffixes consistently

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