Debian type package guidelines for Arch.

woodstock · 2005-01-07 21:56:49

Well, maybe not as anal or strick.

With the recent breed of Debian based distro's coming out (Ubuntu in particular) and with a Debian release just around the corner, there has been a lot of talk regarding this distro. So I decided to take a closer look in this flavour of Linux.

I myself coming from Slackware, have heard and used (very little) Debian before in the past decided to take a look at how far this distro has come since my first encounter with it.

Reading a lot of the Slashdot comments and Osnews comments I noticed that the hardcore/avid Debian users made a lot of good argument points regarding the "superiority" of there distro compared to the rest.

They argue the ease of Apt-get/dpkg and how powerful these tools are and how you only need to install Debian once. Especially now that the installer has been given a huge facelift, it is much easier to install Debian than previous versions.

Now none of that really sounds very enticing as Arch has Pacman, with Arch's rolling-release packaging scheme and the fact that I think the Arch installer is by far the fastest install I have ever done of a Linux system before, I see no reason to use Debian in place of Arch, at least not for what I use my system for.

But the one thing that stood out that made a lot of sense was the fact that Debian has a very strict packaging guideline. Things for menu's, config files and the works all had a standard place in a Debian system, making all of the packages very intergrated and work well together on the same system. Due to these guidelines, one can argue that the package quality for a .DEB, compared to most others is much higher. That is not to say it's perfect, as even on the "stable" branch there are packages that don't always work, but that is very rare.

What I'm getting to is I think that Arch should adopt something similar. I didn't really think it through to much as it is just an idea and I want to see what others think of this.

Basically there should be an offical set of documents that outline where configs go (/etc usually) where large packages go (in Arch /opt) and menu entries etc. This way new maintainers or people who would like to learn Arch's packaging system would know the "right way" for an Arch system, which would, in my opinion, skip a lot of the headaches of malfunctioning packages in the repos.

Another thing Debian has which is an okay idea is they have a system in place that checks the packages being submitted to the repos follow the guidelines and if the packages don't check out they are rejected, as to keep the system clean regarding standards.
Now the AUR (I forget what it's called) system being developed does what again? I only heard about it but didn't do enough digging to find out what its for exactly.

I don't know how to explain my idea exactly, but I thought I would throw it out there anyway and see what people have to say, if anything at all .

Xentac · 2005-01-07 22:24:27

We have a not-all-that-strict guideline in the official documentation...

http://www.archlinux.org/docs/en/guide/ … guidelines

And we don't have things like menu specifications, because we haven't figured them out yet.

We also have namcap which checks for some packaging guideline checking in iit.

Most of the stuff you talked about is there, in the works, or being planned.

sarah31 · 2005-01-08 03:01:12

i would agree that Debian has exceptional packaging rules but they are also and extremely well established distro that that exponentially more contributors and developers. They can afford to take things slow and be extra specially careful because it does not slow the progress of their development.

woodstock · 2005-01-08 16:08:37

Well, it's good to hear that some of this stuff is already being worked out.

Arch Linux

#1 2005-01-07 21:56:49

Debian type package guidelines for Arch.

#2 2005-01-07 22:24:27

Re: Debian type package guidelines for Arch.

#3 2005-01-08 03:01:12

Re: Debian type package guidelines for Arch.

#4 2005-01-08 16:08:37

Re: Debian type package guidelines for Arch.

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