On Sat, 2020-06-06 at 08:54 -0700, stan via devel wrote:
On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 06:40:43 -0500
Richard Shaw <hobbes1069(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 5:54 AM Andy Mender <andymenderunix(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > As someone who just recently started out with packaging and has a
> > fresh view on the problem, I would be more than happy to help out
> > with the docs :).
> >
>
> YES PLEASE. Documentation isn't necessarily and afterthought, but
> it's not "fun" and not many people want to do it.
It is *hard*. Good documentation requires an intimate knowledge of the
system, and all the permutations it can exhibit. Writing about that is
not a slap dash onto the page / screen if it is going to be useful for
both beginners and old hands, it is *work*. Read some of the official
documentation manuals for proprietary software: turgid and exhaustive,
with excruciating detail.
Add Fedora's high rate of change, and it becomes understandable why
documentation is lagging. That rate of change doesn't make
documentation less useful, though, rather the opposite. So, needed
more, provided less => high barrier to entry.
Well, I can just put my 2 cents in here...
I've requested my first package not so long ago [1] and after I find the documentation
[2] [3] it was rather "simple" to
learn how to do a proper spec file. I was a Gentoo dev and an Arch AUR package and the
difference was enormous since the
other ones are basically bash scripts. RPM is whole different world.
That being said, RPM packaging is not *that* difficult to grasp, everything is in one
place and easy to understand and
find what your looking for.
What I find that it's missing is the actual tooling that's needed and how to use
it. From fedmsg to mockbuilds to copr-
cli you name it, let alone the actual workflow of merging a package, "forks,
versions, bodhi", are some of the terms I
read in this ML, but since I never actually merged one, everything is just
"void" for now.
All of this did not deter me from making a package and wanting it in the repos (I even
have a few more to go along with
it), but yes, this part I find that the information is lacking (or maybe I just didn't
find it).