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

[Roland Turner SCLUG]

On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 14:08 +0000, Patrick wrote:

> Matt Dainty wrote:
> 
> > 
> > The problem AIUI is not the code itself, but how it's organised to sit
> > in the distribution. You could quite easily take some Mono code &
> > configuration files and plop them over the filesystem in all sorts of
> > places. Same problem.
> > 
> > Matt
> 
> Is that true?  The apps I see like Beagle seem to have a single *nix 
> executable.  http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/beagle/0.2/

?

a) You seem to have provided a link to a folder full of source archives,
not executables.

b) What Matt asserted was that, even if you had a single binary (ala
Mono/Java/...; N.B. the same reasoning implicitly applies to even a
single source for things that have no widely used binary form (Perl,
bash, ...)), _all_ of the problems with packaging still arise.

Do you in fact understand the problem with Debian builds of Apache? How
might writing in Mono instead of C solve the
transitive-closure-of-dependencies problem, particularly in the presence
of other package-author-built packages which include their own
transitive closures with different versions, or even different builds of
the same versions, of the same third-party packages, or the
correct-automatic-upgrade-of-configuration-files or filename
alternatives/diversions, or inetd/init.d/logrotate/cron/... integration
or pretty well anything else that distros exist to do?

- Raz