[Beowulf] A press release

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, Tim Cutts wrote:

> The difficulty is that many ISVs tend to do a fairly terrible job of 
> packaging their applications as RPM's or DEB's

I very much agree with this. While you mentioned init scripts that 
don't fit the distribution, I can add init scripts that are totally 
missing when they should be provided - a hand-made init script would 
not be part of the installed package and could fail in various ways if 
the package is updated or... uninstalled.

> Like you, I tend to use tarballs if they are available, and if I 
> want to turn them into packages I do it myself, and make sure they 
> are policy compliant for the distro.

I think that's actually more important than the distribution per-se. 
If you are able to package something to fit the distribution (f.e. to 
install a missing kernel module, add an important software package, 
etc.) you can more efficiently use your time later on as packaging 
(done properly) is normally a one-time effort. This goes into the 
direction that the admin should use the distribution, not fight it!

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8869/8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8868/8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de