Re: apt based package dist for guile?

[Paul Jarc]

Nic <address@hidden> wrote:
> address@hidden (Paul Jarc) writes:
>> Perl's MakeMaker means that the build system for a Perl module is the
>> same as that of other Perl modules, but it's gratuitously different
>> from that of all other packages.
>
> Are you saying people don't understand apt/rpm/etc...?

No.  Those types of things repackage existing code.  No matter what
build system I choose for packages I publish, someone else can come
along and wrap it up in a .deb or .rpm.  But users who install my
package from my source tarball will get the same kind of interface for
the build system, regardless of whether the package is a Guile
extension or something else entirely.  (It happens that I also think
that apt/rpm/etc. are trying to solve a problem that can and should be
solved upstream by the package maintainers themselves, but that's
anoter topic.)

> The thing that I was advocating about APT was the command line access
> to a directory of "packages". A common directory for tarballs would
> be a first step forward because we could write some nice tools to
> front end it.

As with the build system, I see no reason to restrict such a directory
to Guile extensions.  Make a directory to accomodate all packages, and
let users query it with filters like "show me only Guile extensions",
"show me only window managers", etc.

Ideally, this would be integrated with slashpackage:
<URL:http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html>


paul