[Announce of Lecture 1] Debian Packaging: Why you shouldn't use CDBS in the first place!?

[Stephan Hermann]

Yesterday, when we started the "Ubuntus MOTU School" idea, there was a 
question, which is also raised as a comment on the article from this morning, 
why CDBS shouldn't be used, even when it's mentioned on several 
documentations about Debian packaging.

Well, we don't say: "Don't use it at all!", what we said is: "Please learn 
first the 'right' way, then you can use later CDBS."

Why?

CDBS is a collection of Makefile rules, which helps the experienced packager 
to create small debian/rules files and doing some hidden things in the 
background. Think of CDBS as a package which was written by Voldemort.
It hide many things from the packager.

So when you want to learn packaging, and you don't know what is happening 
during a package build via debuild or dpkg-buildpackeg, please learn it first 
the "right" way. Doing a manual writing of debian/rules and writing manual 
targets with shellscripts or other small functions can help you to understand 
what is really happening when you build a package.

We think, there is a need to give you a good overview of how debian packaging 
works from scratch.
To accomplish this goal, we managed to convince Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch), to 
hold a lecture about this topic.

Andrew Mitchell (ajmitch) is not only a MOTU, he is as well quite involved in 
the Debian Universe. He went the New Maintainers(NM) way, and he finally 
managed to become a Debian Developer (DD).

Andrew will present his lecture on Saturday the 10th of December. The time is 
not set, because Andrew lives in Australia, so we have to find a good time, 
so everybody who wants to learn this can attend without problems.

Please check regulary the topic of #ubuntu-motu-school or read our news 
announcement on ubuntu-motu ML.

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