Encouraging the use of multiple packaging systems on one systems, and the resulting problems (was: re: /usr/local)

[Michael A. Peters]

On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 21:26 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
> --On Friday, October 21, 2005 3:31 PM -0700 "Michael A. Peters" 
> <mpeters at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> > However, some software is not available as rpm - and I don't believe
> > that the end user should be responsible for creating an rpm themselves.
> 
> It's relatively straightforward to create a spec file for simple 
> applications that packages a source tarball.

Yes it is. If you know how to do it. I only install software on my
system through rpm.
But being relatively simple for someone like me does not mean it is
relatively simple for other people, and it does require a learning
process.

Some upstream tarballs contain a generic spec file that works on most
systems - then you can just do

rpmbuild -ta foo.tar.gz

but I've actually found quite a few that have packaging errors
themselves. Then there's issue where DESTDIR support is not always
proper and some patches to the Makefile need to be added, gnome
applications will require you to disable gconf updating during the
install and do it in the post script, etc.

Users should not be expected to learn how to package rpm's unless they
need to learn it for another reason. I do think that developers should
learn rpm so they can provide a *quality* generic spec file, some spec
files I've seen are just scary (and often not generated by autoconf so
the version ends up being wrong if they don't remember to manually
update it for a new release)