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From: Andrew Schulman <schulman DOT andrew AT epa DOT gov>
Subject:  Re: Replacing setup.exe and cygcheck with dpkg
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 13:53:41 +0000 (UTC)
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> I've succesfully ported dpkg. In a few weeks time, I'll start working on 
> my Debian Cygwin project again, I'm currently busy with other things - 
> but maybe you could take a look at my dpkg changes and see if you can 
> make a Cygwin-dpkg which is compatible with cygcheck and setup.exe. Dpkg 
> is very easy to use, as is apt-get which I was busy porting before I 
> stopped temporarily.

As a Debian user, I love dpkg and apt-get.  As a Cygwin packager, I shudder to
think of the amount of work I'd have to do to port all of my packages to them. 
It's not just dpkg; it's the whole debhelp suite that comes along with it for
packaging.  Excellent tools, but far more complex than our current tarball
packaging system, and with a correspondingly higher barrier to entry for
packagers.

It's hard for me to imagine all of us packagers going to all of the work to move
over, when the current system seems to be working fine.  And new packagers would
be scared away in droves, where the current system makes it pretty easy for a
new packager to roll up his or her first new package.

setup.exe and tarball packages have the very strong advantages that they work,
they're already built, and they're easy for packagers and users to use.  If
we're moving to something else, there needs to be a pretty strong reason IMO.

Not that I don't appreciate the effort-- as I said, dpkg and apt-get are
excellent tools.  Maybe they have a niche to fill in Cygwin.

Andrew.



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