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Author should not be packager. Distro users/maintainers should be packagers. Look at FreeBSD ports: there are more than 25K packages, most of them with latest u
by blacklion 4y ago
Author should not be packager. Distro users/maintainers should be packagers.
Look at FreeBSD ports: there are more than 25K packages, most of them with latest upstream versions. How much of these packages are prepared by authors? Maybe, 1 in 1000 (I'm optimist, I know). NetBSD's pkgsrc is the same. It works.
Authors better stick to traditional UNIX-style build system, which allows to pickup dependencies from local system without problems, and all distro-specific thing will be done by distro guys.
I've ported 10+ software packages to FreeBSD ports in last 20 years, on principle "I need this, it is not in the ports yet, make new port for it". Typically it takes 2x-3x time to single source build, i.e. one day top, if it is not something super-complex like KDE and it is possible at all (i.e. not very Linux-specific when FreeBSD doesn't have required APIs).
Modern build systems like npm and maven, which want to download and build all dependencies by themselves, are problem for this, I admit.