Packaging Training

[Andrew]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:54 AM, Daniel Holbach
<daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
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> Hello everybody,
>
> Nicolas Valcárcel and I just had a quick discussion about regular
> Packaging Training sessions. Based on the experience with the past MOTU
> Q&A sessions and Ubuntu Developer Week and Ubuntu Open Week sessions,
> we'd like to propose the following idea and invite developers who are
> keen to train and help getting new developers started.
>

....

>  - Make use of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Recipes and
>   expand it as we move on.
>  - Ask participants to either add topic requests to a wiki page or
>   mail one of the organisers.
>  - Add your idea here.

One idea for a session I'd like to see, maybe along with some new
documentation added to the wiki, would be something on the new dh auto
stuff added with debhelper 7. I've seen a number of packages entering
in from Debian using these features, but except for "man dh" (which is
very well written actually) I've been able to find very little
documentation.

By definition, the new dh stuff is great for very simple rules files,
but things get a little tricky when having to make a simple rules file
using dh do something more complicated. In universe, this is something
that often has to be done as we are addressing issues in packages
created by others. Adding some Ubuntu specific documentation will
bring the learning curve for this new feature down and allow use to
send better patches back to Debian.

Do we have any experts or advocates of these new techniques around?

I'd be willing to help write something for
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Recipes but I'm not sure what
the best example would be. Maybe simply something like having to add a
configure flag?

 i.e. going from:

                build: build-stamp
                        dh build
                        touch build-stamp

to:

                build: build-stamp
                build-stamp:
                        dh build --before configure
                        dh_auto_configure  --kitchen-sink=yes
                        dh build --after configure
                        touch build-stamp

Or is that so basic that it's not really needed?

I'm not really sure. Either way this is a place where I know I've
looked for further documentation and not been able to find it, and I
think this will become an even bigger issue over the next cycle as
more and more packages from Debian begin to use this.

- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio
Ubuntu Contributing Developer