Karl DeBisschop wrote:
If packagers from different distros eschew that tpe of cooperation, then the developer either sees silence or a "do things my way because that's our policy" from 20 different camps pulling the project in all different ways.
I'm confused.. Do you want policy and guidelines or a free4all? Because as it stands right I'm not aware of stated guidelines for 'community' packaging beyond the efforts at fedora.us and jpackage to document a process that other people can pick up and use.
What appears to be happening at the moment are a lots of little of different ways of packaging are in use...but nobody is actually documenting those practices..they are all some form of evolved mess of 'this works for us' and 'this is what we are using.'
You want to get to a distro agnostic packaging standard...the distros need to layout a guidelines for how packaging is being done right now, and start making sure their own packages conform to that documented system. Then everyone can sit down and compare notes...and start working towards a common specification. This is not a working from scratch situation...there must be an effort to document the current practices, then we can talk about making a best effort attempt at defining a comprehensive set of 'best practices'.
If you are serious about support an agnostic effort than you will package for projects that have stated packaging guidelines and shun situations that do not make an effort to document how its suppose to work.
-jef"to quote someone else 'its about showing people how to do it....'"spaleta