Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] tools: Improve make deb

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:46 PM, George Dunlap <dunlapg@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:22 PM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> - Add conffiles to manage main config files on package update
>>> - Add/remove of main services (xencommons, xendomains)
>>
>> I don't have any particular objection to doing this but I think we need
>> to be clear about what the purpose of Xen's "deb" target is.
>>
>> It is intended as a convenience to developers (and perhaps some subset
>> of users), to allow them to do a reasonably clean "uninstall" of Xen
>> installed from source. It is not really intended to provide anything
>> more than that.
>>
>> In particular the packages may not be fully policy compliant and we do
>> not plan to support things such as upgrades and the like. It also may
>> well be the case the installing the .deb is not sufficient to get a
>> working Xen system (i.e. you may still need to do much of the manual
>> configuration which is needed if you are building from source). If users
>> want a good, well supported package, well integrated, policy compliant
>> package for their distro then they should get it from the experts --
>> i.e. from the distro.
>>
>> I'm just concerned that with these patches you may be trying to turn
>> this simple convenience functionality into something which you think is
>> suitable for end user consumption, which is something we need to think
>> carefully about since there is a maintenance (and expectation) burden
>> imposed by doing that.
>
> I think in an ideal world, "make deb" (or "make rpm") would be used by
> exactly the same people who at the moment do "make install" -- that
> is, fairly technical end-users who have the knowledge to muck about
> with their system; they need to take the responsibility to not shoot
> themselves in the foot (or to bandage it up properly if they do).  I
> think it's fairly likely that this will be the case, as long as we set
> the expectations properly in the documentation and so on.

[Remembering to cc everyone]

Is there a way to add a banner to the install / package description
saying something like, "Warning: This is a custom build of Xen; it is
not an officially supported Debian package.  Please do not
distribute."  Would that make sure no one is confused about the
resulting package?

 -George

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