Trying to make sense of all the X modular packages

[Mike A. Harris]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 02:01:25PM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 
>>There's a release version macro that munges the name of the tarball generated 
>>by 'make distcheck' to include an X release string.  Also, by autotool 
>>convention, everything to the left of '.tar' is the package name, and 
>>therefore also the name of the directory you'll create when you unpack the 
>>tarball.
>>
>>So the problem is this.  If we have a component (say, twm) that doesn't change 
>>between 7.0 and 7.1, then in 7.0 the package name would be:
>>
>>twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0/
>>
>>If we just symlink that file across for 7.1, then we'd get:
>>
>>twm-X11R7.1-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0/
>>
>>And now we have a mismatch between package name and directory name.  We could 
>>probably munge it like so:
>>
>>twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-1.0.0/
>>
>>Which I personally like but which is probably a pain for packagers to deal 
>>with.  I know for gentoo that would involve sedding the X11RX.Y string out of 
>>${D}, there's probably similar pain for other packaging systems.
>>
>>There's also the issue that regenerating the tarball afresh for every release 
>>is potentially more work for packagers, since now you have to check new 
>>md5sums (since the directory name changes) etc.  But otoh, you don't actually 
>>_have_ to do that for every component, since if it didn't change in 7.1 
>>there's no harm in using the packaging for 7.0.
>>
>>I don't have a strong preference here, I just know that when I cut a release I 
>>get to upload everything.  If there's a solution out there that makes 
>>distro's lives easier then I'm all for it.
> 
> 
> From my distro PoV, having the tarball not change at all is easiest.

I agree with Daniel on tarball naming.  My own personal opinion is that
the "X11Rn.y" can and should be left out of the names entirely.  I
realize why it was decided to do that, I just don't believe it is
really that useful or important.  I'm not aware of other OSS
projects that aggregate software and put the aggregation version
in the tarball names of the packages.

Personally, I think using the standard:

     <packagename>-<version>.tar.<extension>

is the only thing that should ever be used, and for X.Org releases, the
individual directories where the tarballs exist, should contain an
MD5SUMS and/or SHA1SUMS file(s) in the directory, and digital signing
of the files.  That lets people know that they got the real thing when
they download it.  The MD5SUMS/SHA1SUMS files double as a list of what
packages were contained in the given release, and a simple script could
be written to check the md5sum of any package and compare it with the
contents of the SUMS file(s), and check signatures.  It would also be
easy to have a script "wasthispackagein X11R7 <package>" that used the
SUMS file(s) to determine that.

Tarball names changing depending on wether they were part of an official
X11 release will cause some distribution packaging woes for rpm based
distributions at least, and I assume so for debian and others.  It's
scriptable to work around it I believe for the most part, but it'd be
better if the tarball names just stayed like they are now, which is
consistent with what most OSS projects use.

Whatever is decided upon though, I'm sure we will all manage to live
with it.  ;o)

Take care,
TTYL