Core-Dev Application: Till Kamppeter

Stefan Potyra stefan.potyra at informatik.uni-erlangen.de
Wed Apr 2 12:12:41 BST 2008


Hi,

On Wednesday 02 April 2008 12:36:08 Till Kamppeter wrote:
> Stefan Potyra wrote:
> > you describe this as a difficult packaging task. What in particular do
> > you consider difficult here?
>
> Problem of these packages was that they were not available as source code.
>
> There were binary tarballs and for some packages even only binary RPM
> and DEB packages. Extracting the file system tree from the DEbian
> packages required a lot of manual correction of permissions.

Why not use e.g. dh_fixperms and do it manually instead?

[..]
>
> Brother's packages install into /usr/local, with paths hardcoded into
> binary-only executables. These had to be patched so that the Ubuntu
> packages install into /usr.

What is wrong for Brother to install to /usr/local?

[..]
> Brother's original packages are i386-only, I brought in the idea to
> generate binary packages for both i386 and amd64, the amd64 version with
> dependency on ia32-libs.

Why is the dependency on ia32-libs needed?

>
> It is really much more packaging-friendly if manufacturers publish
> properly free drivers or at least follow my design guidelines (where I
> have added several items after the work with the Brother packages):
>
> https://www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/WritingAndPackagingPrinter
>Drivers
>
> Brother developers, please have a look at HPLIP. Thanks.

I guess you won't reach Brother devs on this list ;).

[..]
>
> > Finally, the initially uploaded versions had severe packaging issues.
> > What measures will you take, to avoid uploading packages with severe
> > issues in the future?
>
> We were shortly before feature freeze. We got in the first installable
> packages really one day before. And as I wanted to acknowledge the great
> work of these two volunteers (it is REALLY difficult to get volunteers
> working on printing stuff) I simply have taken in these packages and
> thought we will get them polished and correctly working in the bug
> fixing period after the freeze.
>
> If there had not been a freeze, I had done the polishing and bug fixing
> work with them on their Launchpad PPAs (from where the users can also
> access the packages for testing) and passed them to multiverse only now,
> where the packages install cleanly and users report that their Brother
> printers actually set up via Plug'n'Print and reproduce the user's
> documents on paper, like HP printers do.

Ok, so by this logic, I assume you will again upload broken packages, if a 
freeze is imminent?

Cheers,
    Stefan.
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