Things we ought to do to improve our packaging

[Matt Mackall]

On Wed, 2013-08-07 at 19:03 +0200, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> > I think this also needs to be inclusive of builds for packaging systems
> > (Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Centos, Solaris, Pypi, etc.). These actually
> > suffer from more or less the same problems even though the distribution
> > model is different. So we should be building nightlies and release
> > builds for these systems and be more directly responsible for quality
> > and timeliness here as well.
> 
> On the other hand, I don't think there's anything here source-based
> distro packaging has much to do with, right?

I don't know, but I suspect there is. How does one grab the equivalent
of a nightly on Gentoo? How long do I have to wait to install 2.7 if the
packager is on vacation? Is there stuff that requires manual
intervention from release to release like adding new files?

Yes, we could totally say "distros manage just fine, let's not worry
about them", but a) that's not true, just look at RHEL or Debian-stale
and b) there's probably value in any case just having everyone
approximately on the same page.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.