Gerd or Allison (TT 873)

[Allison Randal]

Jerome Quelin wrote:
> On 09/12/08 10:57 +1100, Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
>> 	Hi.  I asked on #parrot, and they all said this patch looks good
>> and/or valuable, but they also said that we need someone who knows
>> something about RPM to review it.
>>
>> http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/ticket/873
>>
>> 	I've put Gerd and Allison's names into the subject line, because
>> they're the names I recall from last time I was trying to get a
>> Parrot RPM working.
> 
> i don't really understand the ticket. however, as parrot maintainer
> parrot for mandriva, i can assure you that parrot is available in this
> distribution, and updated on a monthly basis (unless we are in version
> freeze).

The ports directory shouldn't be included in the tarball. It's just 
storage for the spec files from various distributions. That is, when 
various distributions create packaging scripts, etc, we ask them if we 
can store a copy of those files back in the Parrot repo. It's good 
safety in case one of the distro package maintainers disappears and 
someone else needs to pick it up (which has happened before).

But, packagers do their work after the release, and it's common to make 
an updated package from the same tarball if distro patches need to be 
added. So old spec files included in the tarball are generally wrong, 
and just clutter the packager has to write over.

> 1- which parrot version should be shipped by a stable dist?
> 
> since parrot was still in flux, and not yet used as a vm by a language
> implementation (cf below), i'm always updating parrot to latest version.
> however, it might make sense to ship only a stable parrot (2.0 and 2.6)
> in a stable distro. but since stable parrot happen in january and july,
> and since stable dists tend to happen in april/may and october/november,
> it means that latest stable would be 4 ou 5 months old... not the best
> way to go given rate of changes in parrot land.
> now i've read that there might be 4 stable parrot releases a year, that
> would be very welcome.

We intend the "supported" releases to be shipped in the distros. That's 
2.0 and 2.6 at the moment, but may also include 2.3 and 2.9 (we'll be 
talking about it next Sunday, so far 3 months is looking good).

Allison