On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 00:35 -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev wrote:
On 6/2/05, seth vidal <skvidal(a)phy.duke.edu> wrote:
> > c. Their software is licensed so that it cannot be put in Extras.
>
> yep. that's the use case I figured from the .fap file you were
> describing before.
Yes, I cannot deny that the last 2 weeks spent packaging nonfree
software has greatly influenced this post. :) That, plus the sad fact
that even though several vendors provide .rpm files, they are utterly
unusable because they try to be installable on as many things as
possible, and always end up sucking on all.
Yes, very true. And what could be done to help fix that?
I propose: reviews, feedback, & iterative improvement
In my opinion, your original "thinking-out-loud" post overlooked perhaps
the biggest benefit of projects like Fedora Extras which is the
*reviews*. Folks seem to be very focused on tools but I'm not convinced
that better versions of yum, rpm, rpmlint, etc. will solve everything.
The tools can help a *lot* but, ultimately, its best to have a few
people review your junk and offer feedback. Even the sexiest and most
modern of automated tools still do a lousy job of discerning intent and
suggesting better approaches.
And if the 3rd-party or commercial packagers that you mention joined the
conversation, accepted feedback, and then used it to improve things
their packages would probably suck a lot less.
But then perhaps they wouldn't be "3rd-party" any more... ;-)
Ed
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