Dear all, I've been packaging Virtuoso for Debian. As a user of Debian and Debian-derived distros such as Ubuntu, it eases maintenance a lot to have them. Also, it is in fact very easy in its simplest case, there are two scripts that can be used, I've used svn-buildpackage since we use SVN, which is documented here: http://debianpaket.de/svn-buildpackage/index.html Since OpenLink are using CVS, you may want to look at cvs-buildpackage, which, works analogously AFAIK.
I have a first iteration of the control file, where the dependencies are encoded. If anybody wants it, please let me know. I have also successfully packaged Virtuoso, but the problem is that it contains some binaries which is allready available from other sources, and this creates a conflict. This is the output from installing the package: dpkg: error processing /home/kkj/dev/virtuoso-opensource/build-area/virtuoso-opensource_5.0.8-1_amd64.deb (--install): trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/isql', which is also in package unixodbc I'm trying to understand what the isql binary is and how it relates to the binary in unixodbc. If it is the same, then I would suppose that it would be better to not build this binary in the virtuoso package, and instead create a dependency on unixodbc. If they are substantially different, there are two possibilities: Rename the binary in the virtuoso package, so that it doesn't conflict. If the isql binary in virtuoso can be used instead of the unixodbc, then I think that the Debian way would be to declare them as conflicting alternatives. Currently, the Java VMs depend on unixodbc, so just removing it is not an option, but the case where users are free to choose different implementations are routine in Debian packaging, so I am sure this problem has a graceful solution too. So, what is the case here, and how do you think it should be dealt with? I'm not a Debian Developer, so my skills are a bit limited, but if there are similar issues with the virtuoso packaging, they would need to be resolved as well. Mostly, packaging and maintaining packages is pretty easy. I was hoping that Openlink could commit to creating these packages. It would increase the exposure of Virtuoso, and possibly break the idea people have that there are only two major OSS RDBMSes. The Debian project is also doing extensive free QA. Also, in my experience, sysadmins are generally your friend if you ask them to install something that's allready in their distro, but can be a real bottleneck if not. From my own perspective as a developer, it eases setup of development systems a lot. Kind regards Kjetil Kjernsmo -- Senior Knowledge Engineer Mobile: +47 986 48 234 Email: kjetil.kjern...@computas.com Web: http://www.computas.com/ | SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE | Computas AS PO Box 482, N-1327 Lysaker | Phone:+47 6783 1000 | Fax:+47 6783 1001
