Re: a package without a source tarball?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 03:06:35PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> I think it would be good to have explicit support for svn as part of
>> pkgsrc, so that one can give a URL, perhaps even with a tag.  I haven't
>> looked at the wip stuff, but conceptually it makes sense.
>
> There is still a policy that we want released software in pkgsrc.
> Fetching arbitrary versions from svn doesn't exactly follow that
> policy.

Sure, but we should decouple policy and mechanism.  Getting a specific
revision, or a tag is a useful behavior to have.  A project might well
consider a revision to be released without making a tarball.

The point of the 'released software only' rule is presumably to ensure
stability and to avoid tracking a project's svn without the release
being avialable in pkgsrc.  A rule that says that packages that only
have svn and no tarballs (because of how the project runs) seems a bit
much, even though I'm sympathetic to preferring releases.