[MOTU] Need updated versions of packages... where to ask ?

Sebastian M=?ISO-8859-1?B?/A==?=sch sebastian at sebastian-muesch.de
Sat Aug 27 09:21:29 UTC 2005


Hi,

Once upon a time Vincent Trouilliez wrote:

> I have eventually managed to compile the latest tarball of avrdude,
> yahoo !!! :o)

Fine.

> The problem was that I ended up having to install THREE packages
> (texi2html, texinfo (in order to get text2div), and tetex) to make
> 'make' happy !!  I don't understand, I thought that 'configure' was
> precisely supposed to check for all dependencies BEFORE compiling !

No it doesn't in most cases. Maybe an example. In Ubuntu as in most other
distributions, a normal package will get divided into several subpackages.
Let's say we have some normal linux tool. If you compile it from the
source-tarball you'll get the following programs and libraries: cli
(command-line-interface) tools, the runtime library, some
development-headers and many, many bindings for other programming-languages
than C(++), for example for perl, python tec.. After compiling from a source
tarball, you'll install all of these. For debianization you'll split all
these parts in different-packages, so a user can only install what he really
needs. For example a normal user won't need the headerr-files for compiling
etc.

On the other side there are the developers, who are in the position to write
the holy configure script. They have to write the checks for the configure
script themselves. For example if they want to know if a specific C-Library
is installed, they'll check if the header files exist, and pretend that the
library itself is installed too, if they find the header-file. For sure in
most cases it should (otherwise it was a bad debianized package ;-) ), but
as you can see, they can not check, all needed files, just specific ones.

> Anyhow, I have now the tarball of the up to date package, I have managed
> to compile it on an up to date Breezy, so I guess it must be possible to
> make a package of it and ask the MOTU guys to triple-check it so they
> can upload it to Universe ??

There's almost no reason for triple-checking (it'll need some checks for
sure) if it's uploaded to an "unstable" repository. If something is wrong,
another user will run into the problem and it will get corrected on request.

> But hey wait a minute, now I think of it,
> when I compiled it, I ran "checkinstall", which did make nice DEB
> package, can't we just upload that to Universe ??

That will be a binary only upload, and that is not, what a linux app is
supposed to be. 

> Does the package need some further processing before inclusion ??

Yes it does. It needs a clean debinaziation, so everybody can do "apt-get
build-dep $package" and "apt-get -b source $package". Just follow the
maintaing-guide it is not as hard as it sounds (maybe it is, if you do it
the first time ;-) ).

Cu
Sebastian

-- 
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     _ :'_
   .`_`-'_`.     Sebastian Müsch
  :__|\ /|__:      sebastian at sebastian-muesch.de
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