On Monday 06 October 2003 09:30, Mark wrote:
Philipp Thomas wrote:
And? It's not that hard to learn the basics of package building, otherwise there wouldn't be sites like pacman and lots of volunteers building rpms for various distributions.
If, for instance, the package has an init script, you will have to modify it anyways, as 98% are written for redhat and thus won't work correctly (if at all).
checkinstall's main feature is giving you a false sense of security.
Philipp
No, it is quite hard to learn the basics of package building otherwise everyone would be at it. I really don't think that someone with, say, one week's experience of Linux will be merrily writing their own spec files and feelding in patches like an old hand.
It would be a lot easier to build suse-specific packages if suse released a packaging howto that was written with less experienced users in mind. There is some material already, but it's written with highly experienced users in mind. Until then, I guess my overall impression is that suse quite like the idea that it's no cakewalk to build packages for their distribution and that it's better to stick with what Auntie Suse has provided for you.
SuSE's deliberate obscurantism, as you appear to suggest, or just true that it's not easy to get packaging just right, and true that SuSE do a lot to try to make the entire distro work nicely without being able to spare staff time to write documents that attempt to oversimplify something complex ? Most punters *are* better off taking the professionally packaged product and trying to stay calm about version numbers. Personally I'd rather the SuSE folks spend their time making the distro a good one rather than pretending they can hand-hold every neophyte through the hard stuff - it can't be done for the price we pay.
Possibly, there is a hard-nosed business calculation behind this too, i.e. securing orders for upgrade editions.
Yes, SuSE's central role at the heart of a cruel and uncaring system is demonstrated once more. Don't forget, it was them that started the seal-clubbing business, too.
Perhaps the upshot is that a lot of folks will happily continue to use checkinstall and if the stuff fails to work, well, yes, some may perhaps hold it against suse.
The more fool them then, particularly given the lengthy and patient explanations from SuSE staff as to why it's not a good plan.
:)
Mark
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