On Wednesday 25 August 2010 11:21:41 Hector Oron wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > Hector wants to make everything into debian packages. Needs discussion as
> > it seems overly complex to me but I may be being insufficiently radical.
>
> I do not believe it is so complex, as `u-boot' is already a Debian
> package but it might need some work (scary that you can upgrade uboot
> from `apt'), but it might need a design rethink from Debian point of
> view. Marek is also interested on this.
>
> For kernel, it is just a one liner to get a binary Debian package
> (using `kernel-package').
>
> For the rest of userland, emdebian is already packaged into debs :)

Don't deb packages and the menuconfig mechanism do very different things for 
very different purposes?

I have most likely misunderstood, but I thought the idea with the menuconfig 
etc was to provide a lightweight mechanism for tinkering (eg, in my case 
switching in various YAFFS' versions and trying them out). From my limited 
experience it would seem ponderous to do this via packages, but that's likely 
because I don't understand the finer points of your proposal.

deb packages are surely more suited to distributing packages. Or are you 
suggesting something that builds packages as part of the build machinery ie. 
something like openembedded/bitbake?

From my persective as mainly a customer, rather than the creator, of debian 
packages (using Ubuntu), packages are a great way to keep a set of software 
up to date via apt-get etc, but they can be an annoyance if you want to do 
something a bit different or fiddle.

-- Charles