Xen project Mailing List

Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2] tools: Improve make deb

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 5:39 PM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Maybe we should produce a tgz instead (plain or Slackware style).
> I wouldn't want to create wrong expectations: it is better to build no
> packages than building "broken" packages. (Of course I still think the
> best choice would be to produce good packages.)

I think you have massively underestimated the development effort and
maintenance burden of producing good packages. Again: That is what the
distros do, and they do it well and in a far more scalable fashion than
we ever could.

I can see the point of both sides -- we (at least the active developers) don't want to get into real package management. The point of keeping the .deb as an "easy way to add and remove a tarball" is to avoid raising expectations that we are going to maintain such a thing.

On the other hand, there is clearly a definite need for such a thing. Saying "Debian or Ubuntu should be doing the packaging" is just not right thinking IMHO. We *want* (and *need*) to have active users to be using our releases as soon as they come out, rather than waiting N years for them to trickle through the Debian and Ubuntu packaging systems. As has been said before, building the Debian package involves all kinds of complications regarding custom patches and so on.

What about this: We obviously have users who are keen to have this functionality, and in fact who have made local versions of such functionality to use themselves. If one of them is willing to step up and officially maintain such functionality (which would include responding to bugs and updating things on a regular basis), then I think we should consider accepting such a patch. If it ever becomes unmaintained, then we'll take it out. That way the core devs won't have to be involved in package management, but early-adopters will have the benefit of being able to use Xen more easily.

In any case I would suggest keeping the current .deb target but renaming it to something like "testdeb", to emphasize "this is for testing purposes only".

Thoughts?

-George

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