Re: [Chicken-users] RedHat and Debian packages

[Harri Haataja]

On 07/01/07, Peter Busser <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 12:52:11PM +0100, Peter Bex wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 01:15:08PM -0800, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> > > But the clear disadvantage is it's only applicable to Debian systems.
> > > Still, I'll wager that nobody has a problem with what you're up to!
> > If you would like a completely portable packaging system, you could have
> > a look at pkgsrc (www.pkgsrc.org).
>
> All the package systems I know so far are portable. I think it is better
> to use the native packaging system. For a number of BSD systems that may
> be pkgsrc, for many Linux systems that is for instance DEB or RPM.
> Mixing different packaging systems is a very bad idea IMHO.

For anything that doesn't sit very very quietly in some corner, yes.
One of the biggest problems is that they don't know about each others'
dependencies etc. Of course you'll have some of the same problem doing
"make install". As long as the system layouts remain what they are
today, I don't think that problem is going to be solved.

Pretty much all foss systems, package collections like pkgsrc,
sunfreeware etc and "vendors" have their own internally coherent
packaging efforts and collections. I think it would be best to let
(and help!) each of them do their own arrangements. In some cases you
can make repositories outside the vendor's and add them to something
like apt. If they're in sync to the right versions it might even work.
Getting a friendly maintainer on the "inside" (a Debian developer, for
example) is probably a more reliable approach.

The Adamantix effort looks fine and is very far. It would be nice to
integrate this and Debian. I'm not a Debian developer and there is
some old package already there. If it wasn't for all this, I might
even volunteer some effort for this task.

Doesn't Debian (and probably others) also provide build farms for
their own packages? Those  would probably also greatly help in
building for different available versions.

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