Re: A quality relationship

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

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On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Igor Grubman wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Ioannis Tambouras wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Gordon Russell wrote:
> >
> > > Ioannis Tambouras <ioannis@flinet.com> wrote:
> > > > Q. Which one do you choose?
> > > > A. Red Hat! It is the standard.
> > > >
> > >
> > > All this discussion is silly. Every few weeks someone argues for and against
> > > the debian packaging system. As a maintainer, the debian packaging seems
> > > good, and is developed in-house. I consider this an advantage!
> >
> >   The debian packaging system also has major disadvanges. The most prominent
> >   to me is lack of brief documentation. I need 10 pages that will teach me in
> >   one evening how to build and upload simple packages for distribution. Do you
> >   really think a software developer is willing to learn the whole debian
> >   packaging system in order to add an extra "make deb" line in his Makefile?,
> >   or, the admin to get a 2-year degree from debian.org in order to keep his
> >   system straight? No way!
> 
> I keep seeing your messages complaining how hard it is to learn the debian
> packaging system, and was meaning to respond, but never had the time....
> I learned how to make a simple package in a matter of 5 or 6 hours at the
> most.  The way I did it is read through Policy and programmers' manual,
> then read all the debmake docs, then I tried to assemble a package, and
> while doing it, I kept referring back to the docs, and examples (such as
> hello package) Eventually, I was able to build a working debian package.
> After that, it was much easier to create a second one, and even easier,
> the third one.  Now, I don't claim to be an expert, and I haven't tried
> to create a multi-binary, or otherwise complicated package yet, but I
> wouldn't expect it to be extremely difficult, especially if I would have
> some other package as a template.
> 
>  >
> >   How valuable is the ice cream maker that has 5 manuals and 35 manpages?
> >   If simple and brief docs are absent, few will follow.
> >
> >   What I say is simple. Make a 10 page document of how to make and upload
> >   debian packages, and publish it to debian-user. One month later, debian
> >   will have 1,000 packages, and 1,000 new mainteners.
> 
> I don't know if we want this. We already have 1,000 packages, and it
> could lead to half of the packages built this
> way being broken, as it is not easy to fit all the nuances of building a
> package in a 10-page document.
> 
> Having said that, I might try to create such a document, and post it here
> (debian-private), so that other developers may correct some things that
> are wrong in some way, before it reaches general public.  I am sure I have
> some misperceptions about the system, but I hope there is not many of them
> :-)  This document would be like a HOW-TO that explains the basic steps
> for creating a debian package, but is not a substitute for
> Policy/programmer's manuals.
> 
> If anybody objects to the whole idea, let me know, as I, myself, am not
> sure if this is needed (see above) with the existence of Policy and
> Programmer's manuals.

I'm the new Policy Manager and am thinking about how we can improve the
distribution of the current manuals. (First of all, I'll make a seperate
package since I don't think they belong into dpkg-dev.)

IMHO it would be nice to have more debian specific documentation than we
have now. So if you want to write a "User's Guide on Developing .deb's" it
would be a great thing for the project. (Don't forget to cover Christoph's
asc2deb which is really a great thing!)

If I'm right we only have these documents at the moment:

* Debian Policy Manual
* dpkg Programmer's Manual
* Debian GNU/Linux FAQ
* a few (very short) text file on our bug reporting system
(one never knows which document is the right one)

It would be nice to add the following:

* Debian User's Manual
	(Installation, Handling dselect/dpkg, Installation foreign
packages with alien, setting up /etc/init.d/* stuff, etc.)

* User's Guide on Developing .deb's
	(with introduction/guide style than the programmer's manual, which
is more like a reference manual)

It would be nice to have all these documentents accessible over the Web. 

Do we have a group for documentations? If not, I'll probably try to bring
a few people together to work on these issues. (IMHO if the project is
becoming larger every day, we should have more people working on these
issues. Not all 200+ developers have to maintain packages!)

Any comments?


Chris

- --          _,,     Christian Schwarz
           / o \__   schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@debian.org,
           !   ___;   schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de, bm955877@muenchen.org
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- -.-.,---,-,-..---,-,-.,----.-.-
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