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.

2 Comments »

  1. Ken Bloom said,

    March 13, 2007 at 22:55 UTC (+0000)

    What’s the difference between CDBS “hidden magic” and ebuild classes? Wouldn’t they both do various kinds of hidden magic?

    Or does Gentoo do less hidden magic and come out with a differently-behaved distribution because of it (for example less consistent man pages and things like that)?

  2. sven said,

    March 14, 2007 at 13:12 UTC (+0000)

    To me, there is no difference between the hidden magic in CDBS and the (mostly?) hidden magic in ebuild classes.
    But yes, Gentoo has less consistency across the distribution and (in my opinion especially because of the easy package building and the less strict policy on package behaviour) with less easy upgrading (as in: upgrading often breaks things).

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