Software comes in many shapes and styles. One of the problems the author of software faces is distributing it to their users.
As distributors we should not discourage upstreams that wish to generate binary packages themselves, rather we should cooperate with them, and ideally they will end up maintaining their stable release packages in our distributions. Currently the Debian and Ubuntu communities have a tendancy to actively discourage this by objecting when an upstream software author includes a debian/ directory in their shipped code. I don’t know if Redhat or Suse have similar concerns, but for the dpkg toolchain, the presence of an upstream debian directory can cause toolchain issues.
In this blog post, I hope to make a case that we should consider the toolchain issues bugs rather than just-the-way-it-is, or even features.
To start at the beginning, consider the difficulty of installing software: the harder it is to install a piece of software, the more important having it has to be for a user to jump through hoops to install it.
Thus projects which care about users will make it easy to install – and there is a spectrum of ease. At one end,
checkout from version control, install various build dependencies like autoconf, gcc and so on
through to
download and run this installer
Now, where some software authors get lucky, is when someone else makes it easy to install their software, they make binary packages, so that users can simply do
apt-get install product
Now some platforms like MacOSX and Microsoft Windows really do need an installer, but in the Unix world we generally have packaging systems that can track interdependencies between libraries, download needed dependencies automatically, perform uninstalls and so on. Binary packaging in a Linux distribution has numerous benefits including better management of security updates (because a binary package can sensibly use shared libraries that are not part of the LSB).
So given the above, its no surprise to me to see the following sort of discussion on #ubuntu-motu:
- upstream> Hi, I want to package product.
- developer> Hi, you should start by reading the packaging guide
- (upstream is understandably daunted – the packaging guide is a substantial amount of information, but only a small fraction is needed to package any one product.)
or (less usefully)
- upstream> Hi, I want to package product.
- developer> If you want to contribute, you should start with existing bugs
- upstream> But I want to package product.
Another conversation, which I think is very closely related is
- developer> Argh, product has a debian dir, why do they do this to me?!
The reasons for this should be pretty obvious at this point:
- Folk want to make their product easy to install and are not themselves DD’s, DM’s or MOTU’s.
- So they package it privately – such as in a PPA, or their own archive.
- When they package it, they naturally put the packaging rules in their source tree.
Now, why should we encourage this, rather than ask the upstream to delete their debian directory?
Because it lets us, distributors, share the packaging effort with the upstream.
Upstreams that are making packages will likely be doing this for betas, or even daily builds. As such they will find issues related to new binaries, libraries and so on well in advance of their actual release. And if we are building on their efforts, rather than discarding them, we can spend less time repeating what they did and more packaging other things.
We can also encourage the upstream to become a maintainer in the distro and do their own uploads: many upstreams will come to this on their own, but by working with them as they take their early steps we can make this more likely and an easier path.