Hi all,
after spending some time to prepare a Fedora package I have a couple
remarks/suggestions I'd like to discuss with you in order to make the
process easier for all the distributions around.
Versioning - package manager programs (this is valid in all distros)
handle updates by comparing versions to decide which one is newer.
Having names like Q12010, Q22010 etc will break ordering next year
(Q42010 > Q12011).
I suggest you revise how you do name versions; one simple way to avoid
the issue is to swap year with quarter, so 2010Q4 < 2011Q1. Avoiding
non numeric versions would be a nice bonus, so you could use to the
same effect something like "YYYY.MM" (so 2010.12 < 2011.04)
Installation - files installed by the "make install" step should
honour the "DESTDIR" environment variable; this is becasue packagers
need to put files under a certain build directory to be picked up
later by the packaging script; this is usually accomplished by setting
the env variable DESTDIR or running "make install DESTDIR=xxx". I also
need to mention this buildroot (xxx in the example) usually translates
to "/" when the package is installed, so default installation
subdirectories should be picked according to common standard naming.
For instance, libraries (lib*.so.*") are usually to be installed in
/usr/lib{64}, binaries in /usr/bin, header files in /usr/include and
so on; I believe cmake has all we need to use these these standard
paths, but I'd need to dig manuals and/or other projects to find out
the correct spell to cast...
I think I could uncover more packaging issues as I proceed, but I
wanted to kick off some discussions on these points early so we move
on quicker toward good linux packages.
Cheers
G.
--
Gianluca Sforna
http://morefedora.blogspot.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gianlucasforna
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