Subject: Re: Is there any opposition to a debian/ top-level subdir?
From: Darren O. Benham (gecko@benham.net)
Date: Tue Feb 13 2001 - 18:42:35 CST
The main problem is with the debian packaging tools. They'll create the
source tarball before running any make targets...
hmmm. as I think about it.. that might work for the initial packaging for
debian. The Debian autocompilers will uncompress the tarball and expect the
debian/ directory to be there. It'll call the makefile there called "rules"
and expect it to handle just about everything....
The special target woudln't be used for anything but the initial (i386)
package...
Darren
On Mon, Feb 12, 2001 at 10:17:37AM -0800, Paul Rohr wrote:
> 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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