Hi Miles, et. al.

As an upstream developer/maintainer and downstream user of packages both
locally built and packaged, I've come to the conclusion that, at least
in the case of Debian, building from source is for "those who know what
they are doing." On the one hand, given the wide array of prebuilt
packages available, why should anyone build from source? On the other,
if one is on Stable there may well be a package that becomes unusable
for reasons beyond Debian (occurred with an amateur radio package during
Squeeze as I recall), yet it will not be addressed by the project (an
updated backport was never provided for Squeeze as I recall).

At least due to the FHS Debian has never taken steps to violate the idea
that /usr/local is reserved for the local administrator. As a user of
GNU Autotools in the projects I am involved in this is a good thing as
this is the Autotools default destination directory.

As I see it, project maintainers/developers should take care to properly
document the specific installation instructions including build options
in the INSTALL file included as part of an Autotools source archive
tarball. As an upstream all I ask is that the distribution stay out of
my way for local builds so they can be installed to expected locations
in the file system or in user specified locations. I also expect
distributions to provide reasonably up to date tools in their latest
releases so the user can build the project successfully.

That said, it is quite another thing for someone to want to take a
source package and make a local binary package (.deb in our case) to be
installed using the package management system. That is well beyond my
scope and interest as an upstream developer and I would expect the
distribution to provide timely and clear documentation and the tools for
doing so.

In short, as an upstream it's my job to make sure that 'configure; make;
make install' "just work" and is documented and it's the distribution's
job to make sure its packaging system is documented. Did I explain it
well enough to see where the line of responsibility between upstream and
distribution lies and their responsibility to the user?

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us