Subject: Re: Is there any opposition to a debian/ top-level subdir?
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Feb 12 2001 - 12:17:37 CST
At 09:57 AM 2/12/01 -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 09:57:36AM -0800, Paul Rohr wrote:
>> At 10:31 PM 2/11/01 -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
>> >We need this to be a native Debian package. If no one minds, I will
>> >add it.
>>
>> We've worked hard to keep the top levels of the tree and minimize
directory
>> fanout, so I'd prefer to leave any distro-specific stuff in the master
>> sources here:
>>
>> abi/src/pkg/linux/deb/
>
>I know, I know, and I very much agree.
>
>Debian works by reading files out of the debian/ directory. If such a
>directory existed, AbiWord could be a native debian package. Right now
>it is not and the debs require diffs adding the debian/ directory.
>
>This isn't a major problem, but it makes it far more awkward to
>maintain the debs. In particular, they must be synced with upstream.
>This wouldn't happen if the package was "native", i.e. the packaging
>tools could find the files they needed in the debian/ directory
>without needing a patch to add it.
>
>It's up to you. Right now a debian/ subdir actually wouldn't gain us
>much since Debian's packaging tools need packages to be based on one
>tarball and we have abi, expat, unixfonts, etc..., so the tarball has
>to be specially crafted specially for debian anyway.
>
>If both of these problems were fixed, the original abiword tarball
>could be uploaded to debian with no patching or rearranging of files.
>This has obvious administrative benefits.
Sounds like we're very much in agreement. How's this for a solution?
1. Leave the current tree arrangements as is.
2. Add a Debian-specific "make distribution" target which runs a script to
do all the necessary rearranging to create a single massive source tarball
which meets all their constraints (top-level Debian directory, packages in
the same tarball, etc.) Sounds like a very easy script to write, no?
The remaining administrative burden to type "make distribution" before
uploading sounds pretty reasonable.
Paul
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