On Thu, Dec 23, 2004 at 03:00:23AM +1100, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> The reason that we have package maintainers is because the process of
> packaging a large set of disparate software into a coherent whole
> [distribution] requires both elements of discrimination of
> communication with other maintainers such that all this mess of
> packages works together. Moreover that discrimination includes
> deciding whether or not something SHOULD be packaged. CPAN is a
> wonderful resource, but you can't possibly tell me that ALL of it is
> useful.
Besides that, you must notice that bits and pieces of CPAN conflict
with other bits and pieces of CPAN. E.g. some version of DBD::AnyData
simply doesn't work with some version of SQL::Parser (or was it
SQL::Statement?). Point is, the metadata available on CPAN is
generally not well maintained or not up to date or just plain wrong.
CPAN contains packages which conflict with each other at the namespace
level (I forget, but I ran into this not long ago: two modules
providing the same methods in the same namespace with different
functionality!)
Ideally this would be solved by fixing and expanding the metadata. In
reality you have interactions with bits and pieces not found in CPAN.
Think about messes like Berkley's DB or libpng. Packaging is a part of
maintenance, but maintenance is not just packaging.
> For my own purposes, I'll only package a module if it is either
>
> * a dependency of another package I'm building, or
> * is generally useful
Agreed. I have many Perl modules packaged as debs because it's
convenient for me, but I don't see them as generally useful.
Marcelo
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