Re: [Bug-gnubg] OpenSuSE builservice

[Russ Allbery]

Mueller Achim <address@hidden> writes:

> directed to all the packagers for linux systems: Is someone interested
> in using the build service of OpenSuSE
> (http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service)? This would make life much more
> easier for us.

My impression of this system, which I've heard about from other places, is
that it would make packaging for Debian and Ubuntu more difficult rather
than easier.  These sorts of systems reproduce the easy parts (automated
builds, which Debian already does automatically) while making the
difficult parts (like producing valid packages that comply with Debian
Policy) more awkward.

My experience is that the best way to produce a package that works on a
particular distribution of Linux is to build a native package for that
distribution of Linux and have it checked against the correct package
names, style guidelines, and integration requirements of that
distribution.  There really isn't any shortcut.

The Debian packaging for gnubg is available in Git [1], and anyone else is
certainly free to reuse it however they would wish, including putting it
into this environment if they desire.  I certainly won't object.  But I
don't believe it's a useful way to produce packages targetted at Debian or
Ubuntu releases.

The best thing from my perspective that could be done to help packagers is
to somehow let us know when what's in CVS is stable and should be
packaged, either by sticking a version number on it or by just sending
something to the list saying "what's in there now is pretty good."  The
hard part for me is knowing at which point to grab a snapshot of
development and upload it targetting a stable release.  (0.90 has worked
quite well, though, and I think it will be fairly solid for the upcoming
lenny release.)

[1] git://git.eyrie.org/debian/gnubg.git
    http://git.eyrie.org/?p=debian/gnubg.git

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>