On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Vincent Manis <[email protected]> wrote: > > * At the top level, three files with generic information (these > can be consolidated into one README file, if there's a > standard skeleton for what a README file looks like). > > - README: general package description > - INSTALL: [...] > - COPYING: description of licensing terms
We'll have some way of extracting the README information. No one ever reads INSTALL and COPYING files, the installation is automatic, and the license presented to you as a single term (GPL, BSD, etc.) before you install (optionally with config settings to whitelist and blacklist specific licenses), so those files aren't needed. > On the subject of CPAN, I'm not a Perl user, so don't know much > about how CPAN packages work. My own experience with CPAN has > generally been rather frustrating, because most packages I have > tried to install ended up having unsatisfied dependencies, and > I'd generally find myself doing several iterations, and end up > getting three quarters of everything installed before > discovering one package that was broken or didn't work on my > OS, or the like (there may be a better way of using CPAN, but > I'm just relating my experience). I'd prefer dependency > management to be copied from Debian than from CPAN. I have packages in CPAN and am a former Debian maintainer, so I'm familiar with both systems, and there is little technical difference in them. Debian packages are of high-quality because 1) they are packaged by volunteers whose sole responsibility is the package itself, 2) they have clear policies and guidelines, 3) they have an excellent internal community and mentoring system, 4) they have more users than any other packaging system. CPAN packages can be of lesser quality because 1) they are packaged at the last minute by programmers whose primary responsibility is writing the code, 2) library dependencies are inherently more fragile than the largely self-contained apps that make up most Linux distributions*, 3) there aren't nearly as many users, and those users tend to be able to work around issues by themselves. -- Alex * Large collections of related libraries (e.g. Gnome) tend to cause the most problems for Linux distributions, and the libc5->6 transition was tough even for Debian. _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
