Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 1, 2020 12:15 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Packaging Kubernetes for Debian by dskoll
Parent article: Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Having one repository with all the relevant applications is nice, I agree. But you don't need to build and package these by one central team. “Shops” which I mentioned work just fine for that.

As for “upstream developers” unwillingness to create .debs… nothing have changed there in last quarter-century. “Upstream developers” want to build one package and distribute one package.

Anything else just doesn't make any sense from support POV.

If Linux distributions are unwilling to provide a way for that to happen… developers would cobble together some kind of .sh script. Or some kind of installer. Or would solve problem in some other way.

Some solutions would even provide .debs or .rpms — but they would use the same binaries as “main” tar or sh.

And yes, I agree: it's false to say Debian developers don't alter software… but then situation is even worse: now developers need to deal not just with some unfamiliar (to them) environment, they even have to support code which they haven't wrote and don't even know about! No wonder that makes them unhappy.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 1, 2020 15:18 UTC (Sun) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (5 responses)

“Shops” which I mentioned work just fine for that.

Shops work OK at putting all the software in one place in an easy to install format. Experience says they do a very poor job of quality control and security updating, at least without effort on the part of the shopkeeper on par with what distributions currently spend on packaging. Even shops run by big companies like Apple and Google can't keep out all the malware and just plain insecure software.

IMO, this is the point that gets ignored by in these discussions: the biggest effort distributions spend is not really in packaging, it's in various forms of quality control. It may make sense to skip some of that quality control for the biggest, best maintained packages, like web browsers and databases, which are backed by the kind of big commercial team that can spend more effort on QA/QC than the distro can, but it won't work so well to skip that effort for smaller packages that can't.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 10, 2020 11:04 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (4 responses)

For some packages, the contribution by Debian is negative. E.g., for many years now, I have needed to build xpdf from source on every Debian/Ubuntu system because the Debian-crippled version only prints on letter paper (which we don't have around here); all configuration options for A4 paper (both the upstream xpdf ones as well as the Debian ones) are ignored.

Maybe the overall contribution by Debian is positive, but it seems to me that some Debian people are too convinced of their importance, and would do better by just packaging the upstream with as few changes as possible.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 0:18 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

That sounds like it may be a bug indeed; have you reported it?

On the other hand, the upstream version of xpdf inexplicably refuses to let you copy text from certain PDFs, and upstream refuses to fix this. The debian version has fixed that bug.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 9:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I believe the pdf spec allows you to put flags in saying "you can do this, you can't do that".

I guess Debian honour those flags to avoid potential legal liability. Sounds pretty typical for them.

Cheers,
Wol

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 9:55 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

xpdf does not allow to copy text from PDFs that have been marked accordingly, and that was documented (I don't find that documentation at the moment, though). So it's a misfeature, not a bug; however, the documentation explained that it is easy to change xpdf to ignore the flag, so if that's what Debian's maintainers want to do, I don't think they need to ignore all sources of the desired paper size to do it.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Jan 10, 2021 1:32 UTC (Sun) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Is this https://bugs.debian.org/120645 opened 2001-11-22 and closed 2001-11-25?
Maybe you should reopen it, if setting of /etc/papersize to "a4" does not work on your system.
I just tried to print an A4 PDF into a PS file using xpdf 3.04-14 on Debian testing and the result is A4.
Works for me, but that's 19 years later ;-)