Arch Linux

garba

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2006-12-17

Posts: 7

Better packaging policied needed

After one month spent using this distro on my desktop machine, I've come to this conclusion: it works great, but it needs a better packaging policy badly. There are a few things I'd like to get your feedback about:

1) the pre-built packages in the repos seem to come from nowhere: where have these packages been built? On the packager's machine? On a build server? I couldn't find any spec about how this is done, I hope the devs use a "demilitarized" chrooted environment at least to get sanitized binaries dependency-wise

2) the repos are everything but compliant with the kiss philosophy: in particular, i wonder what the purpose of a thing called the "extra" repo is, you tell me... and using tags instead of cathegories might be a good idea...

3) policies: I am sorry but I find the behaviour of some of the packagers being against the "packaging etiquette", which all users committing packages to the AUR are required to stick to, please take a look at this bug report:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/4624

I even mailed the packager about this but never got a reply

4) docs: for some reason, the devs believe that stripping docs from packages is a good thing. What about making things easier and let the user do the rm -rf /usr/share/docs himself should he ever feel the need to? Wouldn't this make more sense? Please bear in mind that the docs some apps come with took a lot of effort to be written, and are an integrating part of the product.

I hope this post will lead to a constructive debate all the best

phrakture

Arch Overlord

From: behind you

Registered: 2003-10-29

Posts: 7,879

Website

Re: Better packaging policied needed

1) the pre-built packages in the repos seem to come from nowhere: where have these packages been built? On the packager's machine? On a build server? I couldn't find any spec about how this is done, I hope the devs use a "demilitarized" chrooted environment at least to get sanitized binaries dependency-wise

While a chroot is good, the fact of the matter is that it really doesn't matter.  Arch is built such that (assuming an up to date system) versions will always match.  If the packager builds against libfoo v4, the users will have that installed as well.  Dependencies are _always_ checked on packages, so even if one sneaks in there that was unintentional or not indicated, the package deps should reflect that (see namcap for more info).

2) the repos are everything but compliant with the kiss philosophy: in particular, i wonder what the purpose of a thing called the "extra" repo is, you tell me... and using tags instead of cathegories might be a good idea...

This has been up for some discussion recently among the devs.  It is being looked at, I can assure you that.
As for why we have current/extra, the reason is simple: 'current' was made to be everything on the install CD and everything required to have a running system at the bare minimum.  The lines have become blurred recently and with the advent of newer compression technologies, one can get _much_ more on an install CD.

3) policies: I am sorry but I find the behaviour of some of the packagers being against the "packaging etiquette", which all users committing packages to the AUR are required to stick to, please take a look at this bug report:

http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/4624

I even mailed the packager about this but never got a reply

It happens.  People are fallible.  Mistakes are made.  The best thing you can do, in cases like this, is contact another dev, or (even better) fix the PKGBUILD yourself and propose changes.  Ideas and comments are a dime a dozen in the OSS world.  Effort, sadly, is not as cheap.

4) docs: for some reason, the devs believe that stripping docs from packages is a good thing.

This has been discussed for years and years now.  It's a decision that was made.   If you disagree with it, this is EXACTLY what abs is there for.  Feel free to rebuild the package with option=(keepdocs) if you want.  Even better, feel free to host a repo with those packages which have important docs, or even, distribute doc-only packages.  A majority of the developers agree with the decision, so it is very difficult to change the official packages.  Making supplementary packages (foo-docs) and hosting them in an outside repo is totally viable, and in fact, I even encourage it.

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http://phraktured.net