Subject:
Re: packaging policy
From:
Gregory Leblanc ####@####.####
Date:
1 Apr 2002 18:45:58 -0000
Message-Id: <1017686682.17102.28.camel@peecee>
On Mon, 2002-04-01 at 11:27, David Merrill wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 09:43:41AM -0800, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > On Mon, 2002-04-01 at 06:17, David Merrill wrote:
>
> > > It seems that is a lot of stuff to go in cvs just to build the
> > > package, and I don't recall seeing it done in other cvs trees,
> > > although I only looked at a couple. I'm frankly lost, and I don't want
> > > to fumble around in the cvs tree doing things in a half-assed way.
> > > I'm sure some of you have experience doing this, and I don't. Am I
> > > approaching this correctly? Do you have any pointers on how this
> > > should be done? I would appreciate your advice.
> >
> > That seems horribly, uhm, messy. Normally, if you want to distribute
> > the packaging/build instructions, you just put them into the source. If
> > you have one and only 1 something.spec in your tarball, then rpm has the
> > smarts to create an rpm from the tarball in 1 step. dpkg can do the
> > same thing, if you create a debian/ directory under the top-level
> > directory, and if that contains all of the right debian bits. It really
> > doesn't make sense to put tarballs into CVS, nor rpm/dpkg archives.
> > I've not checked out the code from CVS just yet, but I'll do that
> > shortly (erm, right after I fix the plumbing, that is).
>
> I thought it seems very messy, but that's how it's documented in the
> New Maintainer Guide, http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/. I guess
> I will dig deeper into the dpkg documentation to find the easier way.
Hmm, weird, I'll have to contact some of the debian folks I know, after
I read that.
> I am curious why putting tarballs in cvs doesn't make sense. Seems to
> me it's an important file to be held onto, and cvs is the logical
> place. You certainly know what you're doing, though, so I assume my
> logic is faulty somewhere?
CVS is a revision tracking system. It's designed to track the changes
between revisions of something. It's storage format lets it store 200
or 200000 different revisions of a given text file very efficiently, and
allows you to arbitrarily compare them. Tarballs are binary files,
which CVS can't effectively gather change information on. So, it just
has to store a completely new file every time you add another file,
completely removing the benefits of CVS. So, tarballs, and most other
binary file formats, are really best stored on a plain filesystem
somewhere.
Greg
--
Portland, Oregon, USA.
