Use of hfsprogs in Ubuntu

[Morten Kjeldgaard]

Rogério Brito wrote:

> I have updated the package hfsprogs with a new upload to Debian (which
> has not been incorporated in intrepid yet), but the package has a catch:
> it is not 64-bit clean and I have to resort to some hacks for
> compilation under my amd64 system (actually, a Pentium D with Debian
> unstable).
>
> I would like to ask you two things:
>
> 1 - would it be possible to upgrade the package from the Debian
>     repository?

Packages in Ubuntu are synchronized with packages from Debian/unstable at 
regular intervals. At the moment, packages are getting sync'ed into Intrepid.

> 2 - since I plan on packaging it so that it compiles on all arches
>     available on Debian, I would like to ask if any of you would like to
>     help me with this task in a cooperative way (I plan on creating a
>     repository on Debian's Alioth service).

We do uploads of source code (actually: source packages) that are compiled on 
a set of build-hosts without human intervention (and so does Debian). It is 
not possible to "tweak" compilations on a particular machine and upload 
binary packages. Therefore, the package should be able to handle the 
different architectures automatically, and if something special needs to be 
set (compiler options or such) it should be take care of in debian/rules. 

It is more difficult to handle different patches for different  platforms, and 
although it can be done,  it is discouraged. The closest to being acceptable 
is passing different arguments to ./configure, and of course your code can 
rely on #ifdefs etc.

Putting your project on alioth is a good idea, and perhaps your best bets is 
to collaborate with the Debian maintainers to get the package compile & 
working. Then those packages will quickly show up in Ubuntu.

Cheers, Morten