Re: lua.spec for rpm building (was Re: Lua 5.0 ...)

[Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers@...>]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 07:56:25AM -0500, Roger D. Vargas wrote:
> El Martes 01 Abril 2003 20:27, Bennett Todd escribió:
> > I've no idea whether you've any interest in including a spec file
> > for automatic rpm building in the distrib or not, but if you do,
> > this might be a convenient starting point; it's continued to work
> > with little change for me for a while.
> Would be nice to have an "official" rpm package.

Hi,

In my opinion, and the opinion of thousands of other developers and
users around the world -- the official source tarball of a package is
explicitly *NOT* the correct place for distribution specific packaging
information.

If a Red Hat user wants to install Lua from source, they should use a
source-rpm which will have been built by someone who understands and
cares about the packaging requirements for Red Hat. Ditto SuSE, Mandrake
etc.etc.

If tecgraf put a spec file into the Lua tarball, then this will result
in lower-quality packages for linux distributions based on RPM, unless
tecgraf are willing to put in the effort to maintain the spec files as
Red Hat evolves.

Other useful examples here include Debian, for which a Red Hat spec file
is useless, and the presence of the debian build information in the
upstream package would all but prevent a debian maintainer from
packaging Lua in any way other than that which was specified in the
tarball. This is plainly folly.

The "correct" thing to do is to harness the power of the Lua community
to provide things like spec files etc on the lua-users.org site and (if
necessary) to offer tarballs of Lua with the spec files rolled in.

As the Debian maintainer for Lua, I shall be packaging Lua 5.0 for
Debian, in accordance with the Debian policies and such a policy
prevents me from removing files from the upstream tarball. If litter for
different distributions was in the tarball, then that litter would end
up on millions of debian machines around the world quite unnecessarily.

And of course, this also applies for people using Windows, EPOC or QNX;
for whom a spec file is useless too.

I hope that I don't sound too ranty, but I am apalled by the general
attitude of people who want to save five minutes now, without realising
the cost  - for it *will* run into hours, or days, at a later date, and
perhaps more importantly, most likely for other people.

I shall now hide again and watch the flak come in ;-)

Daniel.

-- 
Daniel Silverstone                               http://www.digital-scurf.org/
Hostmaster, Webmaster, and Chief Code Wibbler          Digital-Scurf Unlimited
GPG Public key available from keyring.debian.org               KeyId: 20687895
You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.