Packaging question

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Hi Tom,

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Tom Masterson <kd7cyu at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am considering taking on bug 53062 "mysql workbench package request".
> However I am not suer how we want to prceed on this one.  Mysql has
> packages for ubuntu 8.04 on their site (which I have not looked at yet).

That's a nice initiative. If nobody is assigned to that bug and you
want to spend time producing a quality package for MySQL workbench,
it's definitely great.

There were a number of issues brought up in the bug though, you may
want to verify whether they were all corrected. Just going out on a
limb there, but there may be licensing issues at play as well, so you
may want to investigate that too.

You may want to check if the package has an ITP open in Debian, too.

>
> Do we want to pull the pacages over to the ubuntu repository and update
> them so they are up-to-date with the latest version of Ubuntu?
> Do we want to leave the pacakging to the maintainer on the mysql side and
> mark the bug in some other way?

I think it's better to either work with upstream to review what they
already have done and/or offer help on that aspect of things, or re-do
everything from scratch. The idea is that the maintainer himself may
not have all the time required to do everything related to packaging
and would rather spend time on developing features, but they may also
want to retain ownership of that work.

I'd ask the maintainer if they need help, offer to help out with the
packaging efforts and doing the work of getting the package reviewed
for inclusion in Ubuntu (and Debian). If there is no answer or no real
interest, then I would go about using the source tarball to build a
source package from scratch, inspired from the work that was already
done.

Kind regards,

/ Matt