On 05/05/2015 10:05 AM, Jean Delvare wrote:
Hi Jason,
Le Thursday 30 April 2015 à 16:40 -0600, Jason Craig a écrit :
Personally I'm not sure why something like this is bothered to be packaged, and I wonder what the size of the user base that you mention is. There is no build. The installation process is beyond simple: untar, then configure a DB and web server.
You forgot the first two steps: find where the tarball is on the interet, and download it. So that's 5 steps vs. 3, and your approach no longer sounds so attractive.
OK, if we are going to be pedantic, then the RPM way has two additional steps as well in 1) find the repository the package is in 2) set up that repository in your package manager.
With a package, the install process is install package, then configure a DB and web server.
Then think about updates. With a proper package, this can be automated and controlled. With your approach, it's all manual, or most likely never done, or not in a timely manner.
Well with the actual software in question (WordPress), updates are installed automatically and transparently as users access the web frontend. This can happen as soon as the new sources are available upstream. The RPM package gets updated sometime after these sources are available (probably by a person), and that updated package gets installed sometime after that. So in fact the non-RPM way probably will get the update in a more timely fashion.
Every piece of software on a system should be a package. I can't believe anyone is arguing against that.
But what about the (extremely common) use case in which more than one instance of this package needs to be installed? With nearly every web application it is perfectly reasonable to have multiple instances in use on one (virtual) machine. This is not the case with almost any desktop application, and when it is the case, it usually is two different versions (Python2 vs. 3, GCC 4 vs. 5) and not the same version multiple times, as it is with web applications. Look, I have no problem if people want to package these types of things, nor if there are people who use said packages. I simply find the package to be insufficient for most of the workflows I have used this type of application for as well as not providing any added benefit that I have been able to utilize. It probably would be great if everything were a package, but if package management doesn't handle all the use cases for web applications, then one simply can't use it for those cases. -- Jason Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org