I hate packaging my software for Linux | Fresh
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Nineteen distribution channels later: what it actually costs to give a terminal editor away for free on Linux, and why the next step is a static musl binary that updates itself.
  • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    18 days ago

    When I packaged software, I did RPM for Fedora and openSUSE (because that’s what I used at that time) but out of curiosity I looked at .deb as well and boy are there weird things there.

    There are many similarities between RPM and pkgbuild for Arch, so I could easily copy almost entire pkgbuilds from AUR and merely adapt a few variables but whatever the inventors of .deb concocted is crazy. Archives within archives and other stuff I actively repressed memories of.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      18 days ago

      I looked at .deb as well and boy are there weird things there.

      There are many similarities between RPM and pkgbuild for Arch, so I could easily copy almost entire pkgbuilds from AUR and merely adapt a few variables but whatever the inventors of .deb concocted is crazy.

      That build method dates back super-far, and probably mirrors unix packaging of the day. This is not a good thing, in that it did miss out on some validation features that RPM and NIX have, and that’s a problem that hasn’t been fixed (in unix or debian) even now (25+ years after we noticed it in the enterprise OS company I worked at, and which invalidated debian even then as a product we wanted to support alongside unix).