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

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2012-04-24 at 14:46 +0100, George Dunlap 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.

That seems reasonable, but much of the functionality being added here
isn't done by "make install", is it?

I'm not actually sure about the update-rc.d but the conf file handling
is clearly not part of "make install"

Ian.



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