+++ Charles Manning [2010-08-25 12:02 +1200]:
> 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.
> >
> > 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?
> 
> 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.

Quite.

It makes perfect sense for TCL to make packages of the output of
bb.org builds in order to manage versions and install stuff.

It does not make sense for bb.org 'native builds' by a developer to
spit out packages. Not least because it means you can't do anything
with a balloon board without Debian (or maybe Ubuntu). I see no good
reason to restrict things in that way. Now we have done a certain
amount of that already with the tools stuff which only helps you out
on Debian-based systems, but so far the build system (apart from
making an emdebian rootfs) doesn't need any particular distro. 

An option to put out packages, rather than files/tarballs, might make
sense in the bb.org build system, but making it the sole
file-collecting mechanism is wrong IMHO. 

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/