An introduction of the new cheerleader...

[Cristian Gafton]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Paul Heinlein wrote:

> Realistically, of course, third parties will continue to maintain
> packages for a variety of reasons: the upstream developers aren't
> interested in maintaining an rpm and/or the administrative files
> associated with it (init scripts, logrotate entries, sysconfig files,
> etc.) or the software is written for a different platform and requires
> significant porting.

One of the problems is that there is still a fair bit of "black magic" 
going on about what to do and how to package a project effectively. I 
think there is room for a documentation project aimed at developers about 
what needs to be done to create a project-x.y.z.tar.gz arcchive that can 
be grokked successfully by rpmbuild -ta.

I know that very few folks contact the author and send them relevant spec
files, initscripts, logrotate files, etc after packaging something up.  
It's just easier to package it and not spend time convincing the author to
include those extra files. Or, they send up a src.rpm and say "here it is"  
and nothing more. I know I've done it. And through this the rpm packaging
continues to have this unhealthy aura of mystery.

Cristian
--
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Cristian Gafton     --     gafton at redhat.com      --     Red Hat, Inc.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who 
   cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else."
        --Cyrus Curtis