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

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2012-04-24 at 14:56 +0100, George Dunlap wrote:
> 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?

tools/misc/mkdeb can inject whatever it likes into the description.

Ian.


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