Packaging idea (Re: What next?)

[Ed Hill]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 00:35 -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
> On 6/2/05, seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> > > c. Their software is licensed so that it cannot be put in Extras.
> > 
> > yep. that's the use case I figured from the .fap file you were
> > describing before.
> 
> Yes, I cannot deny that the last 2 weeks spent packaging nonfree
> software has greatly influenced this post. :) That, plus the sad fact
> that even though several vendors provide .rpm files, they are utterly
> unusable because they try to be installable on as many things as
> possible, and always end up sucking on all.


Yes, very true.  And what could be done to help fix that?

I propose:  reviews, feedback, & iterative improvement

In my opinion, your original "thinking-out-loud" post overlooked perhaps
the biggest benefit of projects like Fedora Extras which is the
*reviews*.  Folks seem to be very focused on tools but I'm not convinced
that better versions of yum, rpm, rpmlint, etc. will solve everything.
The tools can help a *lot* but, ultimately, its best to have a few
people review your junk and offer feedback.  Even the sexiest and most
modern of automated tools still do a lousy job of discerning intent and
suggesting better approaches.

And if the 3rd-party or commercial packagers that you mention joined the
conversation, accepted feedback, and then used it to improve things
their packages would probably suck a lot less.

But then perhaps they wouldn't be "3rd-party" any more...  ;-)

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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