[Pkg-puppet-devel] thoughts on this upstream request?

[Nigel Kersten]

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> wrote:
> Nigel Kersten <nigel at explanatorygap.net> writes:
>
>> http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/3461
>
>> I quite strongly feel the upstream source releases shouldn't include
>> any platform specific packaging info, but perhaps others feel
>> differently.
>
> The culture around this seems to vary a lot depending on what distribution
> you're working with.  RPM-based distributions seem to make much less use
> of central repositories, do more building of RPMs from various upstream
> sources, and more often include the spec files in the upstream
> distribution.  Debian goes very strongly the other way, with a goal of
> getting all useful Debian packages under a reasonable license in Debian
> proper.  Ubuntu seems to largely follow Debian.
>
> Therefore, I think the current situation is probably the best situation.
> Packaging information is included for those distributions where that seems
> to be a common technique, and not included for the distributions that
> strongly prefer to have a single canonical package source.
>
> That being said, providing Debian-style init scripts for Puppet in an
> example directory somewhere in the upstream source probably isn't a bad
> idea and could be useful in some circumstances.

I think the same utility can be achieved by us actually documenting
how to use git-buildpackage to build your own debian packages with
newer upstream, with notes indicating where the init scripts live in
our git repo.

For us, it means we're likely to get bug reports ahead of time if our
packaging setup is going to break with an upstream change.

For users, it means they get all the advantages of packaging, being
able to cleanly uninstall, etc etc, without any of the negative
features of having to wait for us to build the packages.

I was meaning to do this on the pkg-pup-dev page, but forgot, so I'll
get it up in both locations.