Styles of Packaging

[Mike Carifio]

On 12/18/2012 01:16 AM, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> Mike Carifio wrote:
>> On 12/17/2012 08:11 PM, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>> Where this is understandably annoying for the application developer
>> is that the recommendation is subject to change over time, as newer
>> tools are developed and adopted: we tend to select toolsets that
>> provide the most automation while leaving us the facility to make
>> local exceptions to standard processing as appropriate for specific
>> packages, which may appear to require an application developer to
>> relearn from scratch every so many years. In practice, the lifecycle
>> of a toolset is typically much longer than the period during which it
>> is the most popular for use, and it is rare for toolsets to be
>> entirely retired (although in some cases the maintainer of the
>> packaging toolset may declare they no longer intend to support it,
>> and it will only live on if someone else is willing to update it to
>> support current policy). As a result, once one learns some means of
>> packaging, one may usually continue with that method for a fairly
>> long time without need to change unless one is excited about new
>> features of a newer toolset.

Emmet, thanks for your quick tutorial. It was useful.

I would opine that many application developers are more than annoyed,
they're lost. So presenting them with all the various variants and
then asking them to select the right one based on criteria they neither
appreciate nor care about pretty well assures that many will silently
walk away.
I know I'm saying the same thing a different way, but it bears repeating.

As I understand it, "policy based" packaging just means "declarative"
and declarative means I can state *what* I want and the toolchain
will figure out the *how*. I don't find that true in practice, however.
I find that I state the what in debian/control, then figure out the how in
debian/rules and then figure out why I didn't say it all properly. So I
google and find a thicket of various approaches and workflows which only
serve
to confuse me more.

I see packaging as something we want the app developer to do. They have
the most knowledge about their application. Given a
reasonable bar, I think they will actually do it. After all, they're
written the application and they want to see it used.
If/when Ubuntu's popularity grows, then the incentive to package will
grow. But let us never forget that this is a tax
they must bear to integrate into Ubuntu. If the tax is too high, they
just won't do it. So we may appreciate a policy-based approach,
the richness of many toolchains and so on. But *they* don't, unless it
makes their lives easier. Note that I'm not saying that
packaging is easy. I'm just saying it can't be a research project for
each rookie developer who wants to take a shot at it.