[development] Drupal Modules and Linux Distros

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

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