On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 09:08:20AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
On Tue, Jan 7, 2020, at 6:41 AM, Tom Hughes wrote:
>
> I'd love to find a way to directly integrate the likes of gem, npm
> etc directly into our packaging rather than us having to repackage
> everything by hand but I just don't see any way of doing it without
> compromising what we do to the extent that we're not really doing
> anything useful at all and are just shoveling out whatever nonsense
> upstreams perpetrate without question.
Implicit in this is the idea that value should be captured at a secondary distribution
layer. Implicit in this is the idea that distribution forks *need* to happen. But they
don't.
In fact, everyone here can work upstream too! If e.g. someone upstream messes up
licensing, the mindset shouldn't be "oh man those upstream developers are
incompetent, let's patch it downstream".
Join upstream. Review *code* not spec files. Fix *code* not spec files. That's the
most valuable thing for FOSS - not spec files.
This is pretty much how we've been working with the upstream OCaml
packaging community (Debian even more than us). Get them to improve
things to make downstream packaging easier. It's been a very slow
business, but things have improved a lot in the last few years
(yay - they now support destdir installs!)
Rich.
--
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