Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]> writes: > Hi Greg, > > Greg Troxel <[email protected]> skribis: > >> Back in July Fibers moved to Codeberg (yay!). >> >> I'm looking at updating the pkgsrc package, currently at 1.3.1. >> >> The README on codeberg points to >> >> https://codeberg.org/guile/fibers/releases >> >> for download, and I don't see links for tarballs. I see some NEWS type >> content, and a tag with a git hash. >> >> I have no idea if the tarball is just a tarred up repo, or if it's >> automake-style 'make dist'. I can certainly clone and see the bits, but >> I'm confused by the lack of a wget'able tarball that I could >> configure/make/make-install in a git-clueless sort of way. > > We don’t provide ‘make dist’ tarballs for Fibers. Instead, people are > expected to check out the release Git tag (and to authenticate it) and > build from there. Perhaps ‘README’ should be clarified. > > Is it OK for pkgsrc to do it this way?
Generally, not really, but we cope with all sorts of things when we have to. Typically packages that need a git checkout are in the new/not-really-baked upstream stage. What pkgsrc -- and I'd expect just about every other packaging system including GNU/Linux distributions -- expects is to download a release tarball from a URL. It is rare for that not to be available, and pretty much unheard of for a healthy project (that is maintained, has releases). Fibers appears healthy except for not having tarballs. Essentially, this is the longstanding abstraction boundary between the implementation details of how fiber does development are that it's in git on codeberg and release tarball is at URL foo and the release tarball consumer need have no idea about anything more, need not have git, etc. I can cope, but I would ask if there is anybody else (packaging, not people wanting to hack on fibers) that thinks not having a tarball is ok.
