sound distribution practices

[Alessandro Ghedini]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 11:09:30AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 03:23:26PM +0200, Alessandro Ghedini wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 09:08:21PM -0400, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> > > What if we did something like bundling?
> > 
> > Isn't this what Rakudo Star does? AFAICT the Star "distribution" is nothing more
> > than a bundle of rakudo + nqp + parrot + some Perl 6 modules, which may be nice
> > from a end user POV, but it's plain wrong from a distribution one. We (Debian)
> > have different source packages for Parrot, Rakudo and NQP (which are managed by
> > two diffent teams) so that we can handle issues and changes separately without
> > the need to rebuild all of them every time one needs to be changed.  
> 
> Unfortunately, aiui Parrot's current implementation requires that 
> all of its downstream users (including Rakudo and NQP) must be 
> rebuilt every time Parrot is changed.  Bytecode files created for one 
> version of Parrot cannot be directly used with a later version of 
> Parrot -- they must be regenerated.

This is true for newer upstream Parrot releases, but it happens that Debian
packages require new uploads only to do Debian-specific changes (e.g. changes to
the packaging, small patches to the upstream code, ...) and the need to rebuild
Rakudo, NQP *and* Parrot just because I need to do a small change to the packaging
of, say, NQP is just putting more unnecessary burden on the Debian
infrastructure (build daemons, ftp master, mirrors, ...).

> > Btw, this also applies to NQP bundling full source of
> > libtommath and dyncall.
> 
> We'll work on removing the libtomath and dyncall sources from NQP 
> tarballs, or make it very easy for NQP to ignore those sources.

Thanks. As far as I'm concerned something simple as a Configure.pl option (say,
--use-system-libraries) or an environment variable would do, since I've already
done the work of annotating their copyright and license information. Of course
completely removing the source of those libraries would be better, but the other
solution sounds more easier to implement on your part and wouldn't require
differentiating the source in the tarball from the one in the repository.

Cheers

-- 
perl -E'$_=q;$/= @{[@_]};and s;\S+;<inidehG ordnasselA>;eg;say~~reverse'
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