Stephen001

It seems that most probably, the next repository will be debian-based. Ubuntu (specifically Hardy Heron) seems to be much loved among BYOND's linux community, which in itself is no surprise. However I'd rather not dive straight into Ubuntu repositories, without having first practiced debian package writing. As such, I suspect Debian itself will be my test subject.

Etch and Lenny have presented me with an interesting situation, along with the very structure of debian binary package deployment. Debian binary packages seem to do a literal copy of the payload onto the system. Naturally there is a load of metadata for describing dependencies, package testedness etc etc. However, the general mechanism seems to be a literal copy, no deployment logic at all. This would be very unfortunate, seen as I would not be able to do away with the new-glibc / old-glibc split the current download has for BYOND. However, Debian dealt with that for me, there is no back-port of libc 2.5 on Etch. So, it's old-glibc on Etch, and new-glibc on Lenny. I suspect that Ubuntu Hardy will be new-glibc only, once again due to that apparent lack of deployment logic (of course, I probably just missed it).

I have to say, as much as everyone likes to stifle a laugh when they hear Gentoo, I'd sure as heck prefer to maintain ebuilds than debs. Even though ebuilds are geared toward source packages (so you'd think, a bit dodgy for BYOND), they just show a level of power to the ebuild writer that just doesn't seem to be present in dpkg. I suppose a little understandable too, considering Gentoo has no real concept of OS version and consequently a common set of library versions. That said, you can fetch just about every perceivable fact about the system you are building for/deploying on, before you even touch shell scripting. dpkg has a pre and post deployment phase, which just runs shell. It beats nothing at all, I guess. Very much the developer's system is Gentoo, it even shows up in Portage design.