Tony Nelson wrote:
> Binary tarballs are common, and very often there is no alternate
> package or it is done so poorly that it should not be used (cf.
> JPackage).
I'm probably more scrooge like than most folks. If I find software
that is very poorly packaged (as binary only no less!), it simply
doesn't end up on my system. I figure that if the quality of the
package that upstream delivers to me is that low, the odds of the
actual software being high quality is very low as well. You can't
make chicken salad with chicken shit, as an old chef i knew used to
say. :)
> The advantage is saving the few dozen hours needed to learn enough
> to make spec files, plus the effort of writing and debugging a
> proper spec, and then maintaining it as the package evolves.
While you surely can spend much time learning how to package, I don't
think it takes any tremendous amount of effort to do most basic
packaging these days. Certainly it takes less effort that learning
the ins and outs of building from source and manually tracking down
dependencies. At least, that's my view on it.
> See fedora-devel-list for endless discussions about the difficulty
> of getting RPMs packaged.
I think most of that is debate about what policies need to be enforced
to create packages which are usable for a large number of people. If
you only need to package an rpm for your own use, you get to skip much
of that debate if you choose. I don't see too many discussions of
things that are just really hard to package, except poorly packaged
tarballs or very badly written software.
> For most of the rest of us, just untar'ing in a few seconds beats
> doing many hours of work.
Except when you need to uninstall the stuff and you find out that no
one thought to put an uninstall target in the Makefile (or an
uninstall script in a binary tarball). Or worse, they put a really
poorly written uninstall that rm's a bunch of your other files when
you run it via sudo.
> Of course, if someone capable volunteers to package any tarball
> they're given, then that problem is mostly solved, as long as that
> someone works fast.
I work really fast when I find software I want that isn't packaged.
But I only work well for myself. ;-)
--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
I like children. If they're properly cooked.
-- W.C. Fields
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