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

[George Dunlap <dunlapg@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.

 -George

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