[Neurodebian-devel] packages for iqr

[Yaroslav Halchenko]

on a related note -- are those .deb's really that bad (never dealt with
them)?  probably they might be quite usable if custom-built
on/against for each stable release/architecture. 

But even if they are usable, it would boil down to keeping a building
farm with necessary tools to build such custom (distinctly versioned so
there is no confusion) packages per each release/architecture/...  For
moving target release/distributions (e.g. Debian testing/unstable) such
solution would result in more hassle since then you would need
keep track of what is happening in their land and rebuild your binary
packages periodically if any library transition etc happens.

Now imagine that some user runs into a problem and would like to
fix/patch it... now we would get back to the round 1 as if there were no
any packages at all...

So -- my summary to echo Yury would be -- why bother with
providing inferior custom solution whenever at a very low effort you
could take advantage of existing tools, repositories with mirrors around
the globe, build farms with more than a dozen hardware architectures, QA
teams and tools, translators, robust building and distribution
infrastructure, uniform across other 30,000 software ways to obtain and
build source packages, ...  ?


On Sun, 18 Mar 2012, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:

> On Sun, 2012-03-18 at 13:38 -0700, Ulysses Bernardet wrote: 
> > > Therefore I highly recommend not wasting time on cpack unless you need
> > > Windows installers for the creation of which it might turn out to be
> > > useful to a certain extent and just do the native packaging properly.
> > iqr provides installers for linux (rpm, deb), windows (exe) and mac
> > (pkg). The only way I can maintain this is by relying on cmake+cpack.

> Spending CPU time on producing largely useless unportable and badly put
> together binary RPM & Debian packages is to my mind a questionable
> investment at best.

> You can very well just recommend your users to use checkinstall or
> compile from source on Linux and thereby save on carbon dioxide
> emissions.

> Please understand that in as much as cpack might appear to be useful to
> create Windows and Mac installers (imperfect, but acceptable), it only
> generates broken garbage when it comes to Linux.

> That's one of my problems with cmake: they put out stuff like that for
> everybody to use and then people use it, because they think that if it's
> there, then it must have been a good idea...

> In order to cover 90% of the Linux market you need to invest once in
> making proper Debian and Red Hat packages and that's about it. It's not
> rocket science and NeuroDebian folks are very helpful in providing
> reviews and advice.

> If you can't do that, fine, but why distributing trash packages that
> would only harm the image of your software for the Linux users?
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Yaroslav Halchenko                 www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic