2007-03-16

40% nerdy?

Posted in Personal, PlanetDebian at 15:33 UTC (+0000) by sven

Hmm, following up to a post by MJ Ray, I found out that I’m 40% nerdy:


You Are 40% Nerdy

You’re a little nerdy, but no one would ever call you a nerd. You sometimes get into nerdy things, but only after they’ve become a part of mainstream culture.
How Nerdy Are You?

2007-03-13

Wishlist for lenny… or why debian packaging is considered hard

Posted in Computers, PlanetDebian at 14:45 UTC (+0000) by sven

Eddy, while I agree that ebuilds look a lot cleaner, shorter or easier than typical debian/rules + debian/control, you should consider a few things:

  • There is cdbs in Debian, which provides a lot of help in packaging “easy” packages. Note though that I don’t really like the hidden magic it does.
  • ebuilds don’t have to handle architecture independent data, since Gentoo doesn’t have such packages. If Debian wouldn’t have architecture independent data, debian/rules would look easier immediately.
  • Updating an easy package (i.e. one without Debian specific patches) to a new upstream usually is a no-brainer in Debian as much as in Gentoo.
  • With ebuild classes, you still have to know/learn which class matches your package best, so you still need to know what each class actually does. That isn’t too different to understanding dh_* stuff, if you ask me.

So all in all, I’m quite certain that the amount of learning needed to create a correct ebuild is lower than that needed to create a Debian source package, but I don’t think that packaging for Debian is hard either.

And finally, Erich is quite right that a central repository for all Debian packaging scripts would be a nice thing. However it would be quite hard to determine the right VCS to use for that. Most de-central VCSes I glanced over need manual intervention on the “server” side to include patches from local developer branches. And of course there is the problem of several packages having a non-clean upstream tarball they need to repack for each release as well as several packages having a tarball which includes more than one single upstream tarball. You would need to find a way to handle those as well.