On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 03:44:31PM -0800, Justin Erenkrantz wrote:
> The issue here is that creating a tarball for your own purposes would be,
> IMHO, overly complicated if you had to find and extract release tarballs of
> all the dependencies. Creating a 'private distribution' (or
> limited-release distribution; which I used to do back in the day to package
> releases to some clients and users) would be streamlined by just exporting
> from the upstream repositories.
I guess I'm looking at this from two points:
a) This is a feature... When we add features we have to way the
benefits, costs, and if it's even really useful. We have tried to shy
away from implementing features that are highly specialized to a
particlar group of people or that nobody has really ever asked for or
can come up with a use case for.
Granted, I know of some use cases for this, but they are rare. I can
think of all of 4 people that I'm aware of that have ever run dist.sh
recently. And none of them have ever had a problem getting
dependencies.
b) We also have to look at the alternatives to the feature. What could
we do that might be better.
I suspect that the few people that are producing such tarballs probably
don't care about including dependencies in them anyway. They're
producing them for a specialized audience that they've probably already
have the dependencies installed.
I still think if we want to make it easier to produce a quick snapshot
tarball we make dist.sh capable of simply ignoring the depencies. Our
build system has no problem with this and it would be insanely simple to
do in dist.sh
c) We have to look at the drawbacks. In this particular case the vast
majority of the use of it is to produce our own tarball. If this
feature is used to produce the tarball it could be really bad. I'm not
going to harp on why again.
> I think having dist.sh capable of running the svn export lessens the
> overhead required to get a tarball out the door. For public releases, we
> can state that the RM must use extracted tarballs.
Wouldn't it lessen the overhead even more just by removing the need to
include the dependencies? We include them to lessen the burden on our
users downloading the tarball. But as far as I know most of the use
cases of dist.sh outside of our uses don't care about these dependencies
and only deal with them because dist.sh requires them.
--
Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org
"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken
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Received on Sun Apr 3 02:27:23 2005