Questions About the Following Group of Packages

[Nathan Osman]

Stefano Palazzo <https://launchpad.net/~stefano-palazzo> has written a
Unity lens for the Ask Ubuntu website <http://askubuntu.com> that offers
users the ability to search for questions, users, and tags on the site
using the Unity interface. The lens originally made use of Ask Ubuntu's API
to perform the question searches but the API was too latent for
search-as-you-type and so another solution was sought - the solution was to
use the site's quarterly data
dumps<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/creative-commons-data-dump-sep-11/>to
generate a special index file and for me to write a small HTTP server
that used the index file to perform the searches. This drastically reduced
search times (down to the order of a few milliseconds) and now I have
created a local server that can be installed on the user's machine to
further speed up the searches.

The branch for the
lens<https://code.launchpad.net/~stefano-palazzo/askubuntu-lens/trunk>in
Launchpad contains Debian packaging and I have carefully packaged the
other components necessary for running the local data server on a user's
machine. All of the packages I have written run cleanly through Lintian
(with one exception, which I will get to in a minute). We (Stefano and I)
are hoping to submit the packages either to the archives or the Software
Center - but therein lies the problem.

According to the guidelines for
submission<http://developer.ubuntu.com/publish/my-apps-packages/>to
the Software Center, package data and binaries should be placed in
/opt. This presents a challenge for some of the packages which require
files to be in other places (such as init.d scripts and Python modules). I
have created a Google
Document<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uOiMNR9IkbItaJS2HwrCcWQdCUdNgeR4B_0_fnytU2Y/edit>which
explains the various components of the packages and the locations in
the filesystem that are used. You can find all of these packages in
this PPA<https://launchpad.net/~askubuntu-tools/+archive/ppa>.
Because an init.d script is useless anywhere else in the filesystem, it
needs to be placed in a specific folder. Likewise, some of the packages
contain compiled binaries and executable scripts that need to be placed in
a location contained in the $PATH environment variable. How can these
conditions be met if the files are in /opt?

I was talking to Jorge Castro <https://launchpad.net/~jorge> about these
questions / problems and he suggested posting here, so hopefully we can get
a better sense of direction as to what should happen with these packages
and what modifications (if any) need to be made to them.

- Nathan
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