Supporting distro re-packaging (Was: [sclug] Linux Apprentice Wanted !)

[Jacqui Caren]

Roland Turner (SCLUG) wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 07:22 +0100, pieter claassen wrote:
> 
> 
>>BTW. a little off-topic but has anybody read this regarding the problems with 
>>supporting custom apps in distros?
>>
>>http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/11/04/apache_packages_support_vacuum/
> 
> 
> Hmm. I've not heard of this guy before, but he appears to have a bit of
> an attitude problem; the distros don't make the changes that they make

Nick Kew is teh author of webthing (the first web standards compliance 
tool) in the days when WYSIWYG was the way to do it.

During the very early days of the ciwa.cgi and servers newsgroups Nick 
was a prominent poster of sane and helpful advice. I classify his as
a CGI and apache god.

I have to say that I agree with Nick comments in that I have to "source
install" apache to ensure I have a working copy for most distro's.
I then have to hack provided or my local stash of init scripts to get
the local linux variant to start and stop it.

I know apache config makes sendmail config (not the M files) seem
siple in comparison,

I understand why some distros rework apache config (I actually like the
MDK config set up) but "starting from source" seems to be the only way
to avoid compiled in distro stupidities.

I have seen responses to the effect of "build from source and let us 
know if it still fails" and the resposnes are always very negative
and is never followed.