Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 2:34 UTC (Thu) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: Seeking consensus on dh by filbranden
Parent article: Seeking consensus on dh

Ugh, no thanks, RPM files are underspecified crap,
incompatible between distros, and the syntax is horrifying.
Also, commented-out macros are still parsed… no, thanks!

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Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 7:51 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (4 responses)

Most people's complaints about RPM are at the layer below what OP is complaining about: the horrid binary format, strange uncompressed key/value store in the metadata, and all that stuff; OP is talking about the complexity of the source level, and having dh, debhelper, cdbs, etc. *is* a problem. There are some things that are nicer about the RPM source workflow (not everything, but some things)

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 9:17 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

So could one hack up a tool to build a dpkg from an rpm spec file?

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 10:06 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Sure you could, but given the impedance mismatch (RPM specs include some things Debian's don't, and vice versa; embedded scripts contain Redhat/RPM-isms, etc.) it'd make more sense to build a debian/ subdirectory from it.

The other way would be to process the RPM spec with, well, RPM, and the re-package the resulting RPM binary package to a .deb archive. This is reasonably simple to do, and flexible enough when you allow the user to edit the intermediate result.

I leave the question of whether getting RPM to run on Debian systems would be easier than writing a spec converter to whoever tries both and compares the effort involved. ;-)

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 13:10 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

RPM has been packaged as part of Debian since time immemorial, but as we know that's not really the point.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 10:54 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

No need to hack up one, it already exists: https://github.com/ascherer/debbuild

I use it for building Debian packages all the time. It doesn't fully support everything a spec file has, but it's got a good chunk of it already.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 11:27 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> Ugh, no thanks, RPM files are underspecified crap,
incompatible between distros,

It's not RPM's fault that different distros have different *POLICIES* - not helped by the fact that SUSE (the second major user of rpm) actually PRE-dates Red Hat and rpm.

So it IS possible to retro-fit rpm to a completely different set of packages, because that's what SUSE did all those years ago :-) Dunno how easy that would be with deb, I'm unaware of any example where that's been done.

Cheers,
Wol

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:23 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not a question of policy, it's a question of a file format that is somewhat unspecified, contains redundant fields, and is unnecessarily complex.

Contrast that with .deb which contains specific files in a specific format that's simple enough to be created and processed by generic archive packers (ar and tar) and shell scripts. (It actually was, in Debian's first iteration.)

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:37 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>It's not a question of policy

Certainly a question of policy too given that does differ occasionally between even Debian and its derivatives causing incompatibility

> it's a question of a file format that is somewhat unspecified, contains redundant fields, and is unnecessarily complex.

I am not sure what any of this really means. Specific examples would help. Pick current ones instead of things solved ages ago please.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 14, 2019 15:42 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

So, are you claiming that extracting debs or rpms using the equivalent of a rock lashed to a stick is something that is remotely relevant in the past 15 years of bootable USB sticks or the additional 10 years of bootable rescue CDs?

Or are you claiming that someone would ever be insane enough to _create_ a deb or rpm package using that same flint axe? Talk about not valuing one's own time...

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 23, 2019 20:06 UTC (Sun) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

FWIW, I use the official .deb of a program as part of the “sources” in
another, resource-constrained, operating environment; it contains the
PDF compiled from Teχ sources (while that other OE does not have Teχ
available, but a PDF viewer, so the full documentation is usable)