vrweb, newbie maintainer/developer

[Paul Harris <harri-pc@ee.uwa.edu.au>]

hi,

i have agreed to take VRweb off Fabien Ninoles' hands, and have been
successful in making it work under my Potato system! woo hoo!

however, i have no idea what the next steps are:

- What is the technique to rediff a package for the debian diff?
- Why is dpkg-source complaining about:
	$ dpkg-source -x vrweb_1.5-2.dsc
	dpkg-source: error: Expected ^@@ in line 679 of diff
  is this some sort of bug? seemed to work earlier... i just untared and
  patched it myself
- Where are the FMs on the debian/rules stuff? I'd just like to make sure
  it works after i get that diff thing going.
- How do I accept vrweb as mine? Do I need to get a sponser or something?
- How do I wack it on the debian mirror and all that?

also, on the other bugs mentioned in the buglist, i would like to see
something like freewrl working, as vrweb is just too big and clunky. it
may be helpful as a reference but i think a new program should be
developed that uses existing stuff like perl, gtk/qt and perl, but doesn't
have to be statically linked. (i haven't looked at freewrl yet).

consequently my aim for vrweb is to just get it to work, i am not aiming
to improve it (thats for upstream people). but would it be worthwhile to
look at fixing bug #29078: package vrweb depends on library libg++272. is
this really a bad thing? surely there are better vrml viewers out there?


Oh and on a more technical note, the vrweb that doesn't work is linked to:
$ ldd /usr/X11R6/bin/vrweb
        libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x40018000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x4002b000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40037000)
*       libg++.so.2.7.2 => /usr/lib/libg++.so.2.7.2 (0x400d6000)
*       libstdc++.so.2.7.2 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.2.7.2 (0x4010e000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4014b000)
*       libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40168000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
*       libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x40244000)
*       libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x4028c000)
*       libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x40295000)

and mine (the working! one):
$ ldd vrweb-1.5/installed/harmony/bin/LINUX_ELF/vrweb-mesa
        libXmu.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXmu.so.6 (0x40018000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x4002b000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x40037000)
*       libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3 => /usr/lib/libstdc++-libc6.1-2.so.3
(0x400d6000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x4011b000)~
*       libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x40138000)
*       libXt.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXt.so.6 (0x40213000)
*       libSM.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x4025c000)
*       libICE.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x40265000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)

the *s indicate difference between the two. now, why doesn't the old one
work? the libraries they were compiled for may be different, but won't it
work with the old libc stuff installed? should i even bother thinking
about this since the new compile works? i only ask as other people seem to
have problems with their old libc5 stuff... maybe the same problem is
suffered here... would this help anyone to debug it?

anyway, i'm looking forward to sumbitting a working version of vrweb, so
let me know about the proper procedures soon please! thanks!

Paul Harris