[OpenAFS] Re: OpenAFS and RHEL5 Server 64-bit?

[Russ Allbery]

Scott Ehrlich <scott@MIT.EDU> writes:

> Wny don't the source organizations (i.e. abisource for abiword) create
> .deb and .rpms for that program, instead of having to find it at some
> random site, not knowing who has really done what to create the rpm at
> the repo site.

For Debian packages, this is a bad idea.  Debian packages should be
uploaded to Debian proper; there's usually no reason to have to search a
variety of third-party sites, and usually doing so is a bad idea.  (The
only exception is software that can't be accepted into Debian for legal
reasons, for which there is debian-multimedia.)  As much as possible, all
Debian packages should be in Debian, with backports to stable as necessary
available from backports.org.

Most of the Debian packages created by random software maintainers who do
not themselves use Debian or use it only lightly are, to be blunt, awful.
There's a lot more to making a package that installs, upgrades, and
integrates well than just slapping a few binaries into a package format.

A well-done package is the best of all worlds, but I think you're often
better off building from source and installing in /usr/local than using a
badly-done package.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>