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

[Roland Turner SCLUG]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 13:04 +0000, Jacqui Caren wrote:

> 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.

Fair enough; this may also explain his rather narrow worldview.

> 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.

Yup. This is an area where LSB could make some useful progress, but the
(quite reasonable) fear of avoiding inventing new file formats has
prevented this from occuring.

...
> 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.

You're repeating Nick's parochialism here. Distros have very different
priorities to those of the package authors (neccessarily, unless >10 000
projects happen to have the same priorities...). Debian doesn't even
claim that its Apache build is useful in all circumstances; I forget
where I came across this, but there's a clear assumption that, if you
fall outside the common cases that the Debian build caters for, you'll
need to build your own. To refer to this is stupidity is to display
ignorance as to what it is that distros actually strive to achieve.

> 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.

Naturally :-)

An installer-script-free standard package for binaries (at least for
i386) and per-distro instructions to get the package author's builds
onto the user's machine would short-circuit this problem in almost all
cases.

- Raz