Seemant Kulleen wrote:
So, there's been talk for a while in Gentooland of packaging up drupal modules to offer to gentoo users. As people are probably aware, the Gentoo way is to fetch source tarballs directly from upstream sources and build on the users' boxes. Drupal modules have historically been problematic for us to package, however.
Our relationship with people packaging Drupal has also been rather problematic. ;p Also, before you consider doing any package you should check if your distribution's release policy matches Drupal's. As a result of such a check not being done, Debian ships now with a Drupal 4.5 package which isn't maintained by us anymore.
The thing is we do digest checking on the tarballs to assure some level of integrity. So, once a tarball is released, we count on that tarball not changing (a change signifies something potentially sinister happened). So, I'd like to make a request to the development community here (especially authors of contributed modules): would it be possible to change tarball versions when the contents change? That would help us in Gentoo to finally bring drupal modules to the Gentoo masses.
This is not a thing developers themselves can do anything about. The problem is with our way of packaging things. Luckily, this should change soon and from there on tarballs once created should be stable. Cheers, Gerhard