David Gillies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>
> <SNIP>
>
>> It is also helpful to try and avoid building your own custom packages as
>> much as possible. In many cases alternatives exist, or waiting for an
>> upgrade has a longer cost.
>
> <SNIP>
>
>> Yes: checkinstall is a good tool for doing this, although the various
>> 'dh-make-*' packages provide good support for Perl and PHP modules.
>
> How can you on the one hand suggest avoiding creating your own custom
> packages on the one hand and then suggest that checkinstall is a good
> tool??
The answer is very simple:
It is, in my opinion, a terrible mistake to build a custom package.
The order of "goodness" runs, roughly, a distribution supplied package,
a third party package from a trustworthy repository, a private package
used across the board in your company, then building something yourself.
If, however, you are not able to avoid creating a custom package then
checkinstall is a reasonable start, and is certainly the best tool
available to do the "this" from the statement above: wrapping a package
around something you compile by hand.
So, while I think it is a terrible mistake to build your own packages
I can also recognise that /if/ you are going to, checkinstall is a
potentially valuable tool to support those actions.
> Atleast if you create your own you have the opportunity to create a
> package with some dependencies instead of the "not much better than a
> tarball" rubbish rpms that checkinstall spits out.
Last time I used checkinstall to build Debian and RPM packages it did
considerably better than you suggest. Not nearly as well as a genuine
OS package written by hand, granted, but better than "no dependencies".
However, as noted above: I strongly believe that checkinstall should be
your last resort, since you shouldn't build packages yourself at all[1],
and it *definitely* beats 'make install'.
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] ...which I say /knowing/ that this isn't always possible in
reality, but which is still a good goal to aim for.
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