Jonas and I had a brief conversation about starting to package chandler-desktop. I think we're eager to get started and see if we can make some sense of it.
What follows is our conversation to date. Matt Schafer -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: chandler-desktop packaging Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:33:15 -0700 From: Matt Schafer <m...@slyy.net> To: Jonas Smedegaard <d...@jones.dk> Howdy, Jonas. You wrote: > I am still interested in packaging it [Chandler Desktop] for Debian. > My experience so far is that it is difficult to package properly, > because upstream do not follow standard routines of separating > libraries and executables, and pulls VCS sources as part of the build > process. Yes. This is going to be a challenging project. However, upstream has been cleaning up the build process in relation to the Ubuntu distribution. They have created a debian directory with the control, rules and changelog files, etc. By using that build process, they do pull the source tree from the SVN repository, but then package it into an orig.tar.gz. That is then used for the build, at least for the parts that are truly the Chandler Desktop program. In addition, they have been removing from the build process those packages that appear in the Ubuntu repositories at the necessary versions. On Sunday, I built the current SVN trunk for Ubuntu 9.04. - From what I can see, the only packages that are downloaded from the Chandler repositories and built are: 1. wx and wxPython. These are patched heavily for Chandler. 2. bdb. Also patched for Chandler. 3. PyLucene. May or may not be patched, but the pylucene package in Debian requires python2.5. Must work for python2.6 for the latest Ubuntu. (Debian is still using python2.5.) 4. zanshin. Doesn't appear in Debian or Ubuntu repositories. 5. swig. Patched for Chandler. 6. vobject. I think this is a problem with setuptools. Shouldn't have been downloaded. I think we can use the current build system and debian directory as a starting point. But there will be a lot to clean up, and I'm not sure how to handle these patched dependencies. > Seems to upcoming 2.x will cleanup much of that. Time will tell. I have no idea. Chandler Desktop 2.x is still in its infancy. I think it will be a long time before that is ready. I'd still like to get 1.x packaged properly, partly so that I can learn, but also so that I can send patches and suggestions to upstream so that 2.x is solid. > Would you perhaps be interested in teaming up with me and maintain > packaging together? I think that would be great. > I have strong opinions on packaging style and > really do want to treat Debian as upstream to Ubuntu, Agreed. Debian is upstream to Ubuntu. My original intent was to get it packaged for Ubuntu because that is the distro that I use. Then make sure that it got back into the Debian repositories. > so teaming up > with me would mean using Alioth (not Launchpad) using Git (not > Bazaar), and using CDBS (not plain debhelper). That's all fine. I have not packaged anything before, though I have been using Ubuntu for about four years. I'm new to packaging for either distro, Debian in general and Debian's packaging system specifically. I should mention that upstream's .deb build system uses the quilt patch tool. > I would be happy to guide you trough all of those, if you are > unfamiliar with any of it. Would be great to work together! Unfamiliar with all of it, actually. I have been reading up on the Ubuntu Packaging Guide and the Debian & Ubuntu Policy. I'll switch to studying up on the Debian docs, though they seem to be mostly similar. Have you done much packaging work with Debian in the past? This will be a good way to learn. Especially with such a difficult project. But I really want to get this one cleaned up, since I use it all the time. At some point, I'm going to want to switch over to helping with Chandler development. But for now, I just want to see what we currently have in the repositories. So where do we start? Thanks, Matt -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
