[X2Go-Dev] X2Go organigram

[Oliver Burger]

2013/3/12 Mike Gabriel <mike.gabriel at das-netzwerkteam.de>:
>>>> Jan Engelhard (X2Go for RPM-based distros)
>>>
>>>
>> Wouldn't it be better to let the distros provide their packages? After
>> all that's what distros are there for, aren't they?
>> Of course it's nice for an end user, when his distro does not provide
>> a package and the upstream project provides it, but from a distro
>> packager perspective, it's bad, since
>
>
> I can only speak for Debian. At the time of writing I do not see a chance to
> get nx-libs (full) into Debian due to this outdated X.org tree that is
> behind it. So, for Debian systems, we have to provide packages by upstream.
That's true and the same could be true for RHEL, SLES, CentOS and so on.
>
> Differently for Ubuntu. X2Go Server & co. could be in Ubuntu, however, so
> far I have not bothered.
>From the end user's point of view that's ok. As long as a distro does
not package certain software, it's nice to have upstream packages.

>> - you will necver know about conflicts between third party packages
>> and those provided by the distro itself.
>
> Unless you know the distro you package for outside the distro really well. I
> am about to become a Debian Developer (only thing left is the account
> creation on the Debian infrastructure), so I am pretty much involved in that
> anyway.
I didn't really talk about Debian. I know most of you are using Debian
and you yourself are involved in Debian itself.
I was talking about the "packages for rpm-based distros".

>> - it's kind of hard to provide universal rpm packages, as the naming
>> shema of libraries and other needed packages does vary quite a lot
>
> I have no clue at all about RPM. Others have to comment on this.

The problem is, that while (at least almost) all deb-based distros are
really Debian-based distros and thus their base systems are quite
similar to each other,
rpm-based distros aren't.
Of course there are similarities between openSUSE, Fedora, Mageia and
so on, but there are quite some differences as well.
All of those distros use rpm as a package format, but not all are
RedHat-based and even those who are (like Mageia by way of Mandrake
and Mandriva), they split up so early, that they moved apart.

So for those distros that do provide packages, wouldn't it be better
to talk to the package maintainers there and ask them to provide up to
date distro specific packages for their distro, when a new x2go
version is released?
They would still have to be hosted as third party packages since most
distros don't allow for version upgrades during the release cycle of a
distro, but at least, the problem of having conflicts would be
minimized...

>
>> - people will always complain to the distro's bug tracker and triaging
>> teams have much fun explaining to those, that it's not the distro's
>> fault as the packages in use are not provided by the distro
>
> With Debian, you can only report bugs to packages that exist in Debian. The
> described experience I do not have here.
>
Well I have, as in Mageia's bugzilla, you can open a bug report
without providing the source rpm package against which the bug report
should be opened.

Oliver