Request for review

[Robert Park]

Quite the thorough review, thank you!

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:52 AM, Benjamin Drung <bdrung at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Debian uses -1, -2, and so on for the package revision. Ubuntu appends
> ubuntu1, ubuntu2, and so on if they change something in the package.
> -0ubuntu1, -0ubuntu2, and so on is used if the package is not taken from
> Debian. -1 will be higher than any -0ubuntuX version.

Ok, that system makes more sense. I was running into trouble because I
didn't have the preceding 0 in the ubuntu version string.

>>  Of course, it
>> looks like debian is in freeze, so I guess I'm supposed to pursue
>> acceptance in universe before I'll be able to get it into debian
>> unstable. Is that right? I filed a needs-packaging bug in launchpad.
>
> The Debian freeze prevents packages to move from unstable to testing,
> but it does not prevent new packages into unstable. It's recommended to
> get the package in Debian first and then use requestsync (or syncpackage
> if you have upload rights) to get it synced into Ubuntu.

Yes in theory, however I've been following a few other people's
request for sponsorship in debian-mentors and it seems nearly
impossible to get sponsorship during the freeze, because nobody cares
about new packages and everybody is busy testing the frozen 'testing'
distro.

> I had a quick look at your package on mentors:
>
> 1) The changelog should only contain entries for version that are
> actually in the archive. In your case, only one changelog entry would
> remain.

But the program has been packaged on a launchpad PPA up until this
point, so theoretically there are users in the wild with old versions
of this package. It's not like this is the first ever version of the
package and I just arbitrarily felt like creating a retroactive
changelog for nonexistent packages. Am I seriously supposed to
truncate the changelog just because I'm seeking the package's
inclusion in debian?

> 2) You should close the ITP bug with your first upload.
>
> 3) Please drop the comments in debian/rules
>
> 4) The changelog Format should point to
> http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
> instead of the unversioned http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5
>
> 5) You might want to use wrap-and-sort to make your debian/control file
> look nicer.
>
> 6) >= 8.0.0 can be shortened to >= 8
>
> 7) The Vcs-* entries should point to the packaging branches and these
> should preferable hosted on Debian infrastructure like Alioth.

Ok, will do. Thanks for these tips.

> 8) Do you really need patches for your Debian package?

Why not? The patches are mostly to do with distutils, specifically in
the sense that the 'upstream' tarball is configured to be able to run
uninstalled, but the debian package drops some of that code because it
was interfering with the building of the package.

> 9) You should add a debian/watch file if you release source tarballs.

Any advice on what a watch file would look like for this github page?

https://github.com/robru/gottengeography/tags

Thanks!

-- 
http://gottengeography.ca