Re: make distcheck in tinderbox [was Re: make check failures- gnome-vfs, e-d-s, at-spi]

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 11:31 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 7/19/05, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> > The naming of the packages could also be such that there is no chance of
> > conflicting with your vendor gnome, current version or later installed.
> 
> I think Dan was suggesting (and certainly it is easier to produce)
> something that isn't a package at all, just a tarball of binaries and
> magic files, built into /opt/.

Real packages have a few benefits:
      * Can be installed with tools that the user is more likely to be
        familiar with (and in particular, can be easily installed with
        GUI tools on many distros)
      * Easy to remove, easy to upgrade without worrying about there
        being cruft left behind

But they don't need to be "good" packages in terms of integrating with
the rest of the distro. These are the sort of packages that can be
produced in 10 seconds given a tarball and a perl script.

> [Note that if done well, I don't actually think distributing packages
> that conflict with your vendor GNOME is a problem, given proper
> warning labels all over the place.]

That requires more distro-specific smarts though, since the
packages-to-be-conflicted-with won't always have the same names. It also
makes it much harder for the user to fall back to vendor packages if the
jhbuild on a given day turns out to be badly broken.

-- Dan