Subject: Whoa!
From: janne halttunen (jhalttun_AT_pp.htv.fi)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 17:34:35 EEST
I was peacefully cruising the web when I ran into following in the discussion-forums of my current distro, Mandrake Linux. A piece called "Of packagers and developers":
http://www.mandrakeforum.com/article.php?sid=2482&lang=en
The offending part (even though I am neither a developer or packager of ecasound directly):
"""Developers are the worst packagers
First we got this amusing piece of conversation:
A: It's the original from the ecasound website, packed by the developer.
B: Ugh, those are almost always the *WORST* rpms. I always end up rewriting them from scratch.
That was the trigger that got the nice packagers-contra developers rant I'm talking about. So, if you are looking for some anti-developers rant, here they come:
1. Developers have all devel packages and miss buildrequires
2. Developers know all the command-line options, and don't care to launch it from a menu
3. Developers know all the files it supports, so don't think it needs mime-type entries
4. Developers happily apply changes to the original source and bump the release number (instead of using a patch or bumping the version number)
5. Developers think %changelog is where they should put details about changes in their source
6. Developers think that since the %changelog is now so important, it shouldn't go at the end of the file, but somewhere in the middle.
7. Developers think that since they maintain the makefile, there is no reason they shouldn't just do the same stuff in their spec file, instead of supporting 'make DESTDIR=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT' install
8. Developers hard-code paths into the spec instead of using macros that are available (%{_sbindir} for example).
9. Developers assume that since make install is normally run as root, they can have their install target fail if it can't change ownerships of files (breaking non-root rpm builds).
10. Of course all of the above mentioned problems stem from the fact that they spend too much time programming, and not enough time packaging ..."""
I personally haven't used ecasound rpms lately and don't know how well they work with Mdk9.0, but still it's strange they picked ecasound as the target of a "lousily packaged rpms" -rant.
I sympatize with at least points 1 and 10.
I fully don't understand points 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Point 2 is bit funny with ecasound in question, but it could lend it some more visibility, though.
Point 3 is bit troublesome, because ecasound can support such large margin of formats, albeit with help of some other programs required to be present. Correctly installed ecasound could make distribution-builder's job easier.
Anybody have comments?
janne
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