CPack 2.6 and downstream packagers

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 03.04.08 22:42:12, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> I think that would make life easier for downstream packagers. The  
> other options are:
> - they maintain their own CPack stuff on their own repository, totally  
> unrelated to KDE
> - they keep packaging as they have done until now, as if CPack 2.6  
> cannot properly package .deb and .rpm

Note that Debian maintainers already keep their "diffs" (i.e. debian
subdir, patches and whatever else they have) in their own repository.

Also I'm not sure that cpack's .deb support is advanced enough for the
needs of such large packages. And the needs of the package maintainers.
Its not like you can simply stuff the binary/libs/docs/icons into a .deb
in an apropriate structure. There are post/pre install/remove scripts to
handle, there's a debian-specific changelog to handle. There are
possibly debian-specific patches to handle. There's automated building
via standard debian build mechanism on debian servers to build for all
architectures that weren't uploaded by the package maintainers (i.e.
they upload i386+source and the other 11 archs are automatically built
from that, without cpack)

So while its nice that CPack supports .deb packages, I don't think its
suitable (or should be actually) for providing the packages in a
distribution. Its good as an easy way for people that want to provide
binaries from their new KDE4 app, though. 

> Is there a kde-packagers mailing list where packagers from different  
> distributions are subscribed? That would be the best place to discuss  
> this

Yes, but I'm not sure about the actual adress atm, it might be just
kde-packagers at kde.org

Andreas
 
-- 
Go to a movie tonight.  Darkness becomes you.