Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Davidsaver <[email protected]> · Tue, 13 Feb 2018 11:16:34 -0800

Lewis,

On 02/13/2018 08:33 AM, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> On 02/12, Anton Derbenev wrote:
>> Any thoughts on the matter are also welcome.
> 
> Hello, Anton!
> 
> I think your project is a good, but I think even better would have been
> to use pkgsrc <https://www.pkgsrc.org/>

Have you tried working with this tool?  I hope you'll forgive me a rant,
but I've been doing packaging on various platforms for 15 years now.
Ever since a search for "make uninstall" led me to http://checkinstall.izto.org/

I wish this problem was as simple as tooling...

See for reference the Debian Policy Manual (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/)
and Lintian (https://lintian.debian.org/).  Yes, there is a linting
tool for debian packaging.

The redhat equivalent to this is I think https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines
although it's been a while (9 years) since I've written a .spec file.

> instead of Debian packaging.
> It's probably too late for you to change, and I don't want to sound
> critical but with Debian packaging, you are only reaching sites and
> users who use a Debian-based distribution.  (I'm sure there are tools
> to convert .deb into whatever, but I doubt many in the EPICS community
> are using them, and I don't know how seamless the experience would be.)

Not nearly as seamless as native/complaint packaging, sometimes to the
point of being unusable.  eg. look for upgrades to silently leave behind
missing libraries due to incomplete dependency lists.

Following a distribution policy gives a level of "just works" which isn't
attainable with the various meta packaging tools like pkgsrc, the
translators like alian, nor the shell scripts which grow, like mushrooms,
around any binaries stored on an NFS share.

> You're probably not reaching any site or user who uses CentOS, RHEL,
> or any other non-Debian-based Linux distribution.

With the (qualified) exception of ITER.  To my knowledge, none of the
sites using the redhat based distros are using RPMs to distribute epics
modules.

The best response I've had is "If you do the work, we'll look at it".
Which is no kind of motivation given the time needed to enable such a
"look".  Of course, if you'd like to change this then I'm all ears.

Michael

The qualification w/ ITER being that these packages don't follow
the fedora policies in ways which limit their general usefulness.
So it's really more like substituting 'rpm' for 'tar'.

FYI. an .rpm is really a cpio archive while a .deb is an ar archive
containing two compressed tars.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System