NMU etiquette (arpwatch package)

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

(Please CC me on replies as i'm not subscribed to debian-devel)

it's been a long time since I've done this, so i'd like to know what
the current etiquette is for an NMI.

arpwatch has had only sporadic NMU updates since 2004.  I've packaged
the latest version and applied a bunch of patches from the BTS (all that
applied cleanly without conflicting with other patches), and fixed a few
other minor bugs.  most of these bugs are years old.

I'd like to upload this to unstable, but i don't want to maintain the
package forever.  I've mostly worked on this NMU because I wanted to
fix the sprintf for printing MAC addresses (zero-padded with %02x
rather than just %x), and decided I may as well fix some of the other
outstanding bugs too.

probably the only really controversial thing about this NMU is that i've
dumped the dbs-based packaging, and just gone with debhelper.  I don't
have time to learn dbs and have no inclination to do so, either. i like
the *idea* of dbs but not the practice (i find it's a pain to work with
-- it was easier for me to re-package the latest version of arpwatch
from scratch than it was to figure out how dbs works just to make a
one-line change for the sprintf problem). given that arpwatch has hardly
been touched for the last few years, i'd guess that dbs is putting off
other potential NMUs or maybe even an adopter too.


anyway, here's the changelog entry:

arpwatch (2.1a15-1) unstable; urgency=low

  * not-so-new upstream release (Closes: #427867)
  * converted packaging from dbs to debhelper
  * applied all existing patches from old 2.1a13 package
  * made bihourly.sh an example, and copied bihourly cron script from 2.1a13
  * deleted duplicate errs= line from bihourly (Closes: #321504)
  * fixed sprintf in ec.c (Closes: #315215)
  * Applied patch from Sebastian Reichelt <SebastianR@gmx.de> to initialise interface variable (Closes: #289426)
  * updated watch file to v3 (Closes: #529097)
  * applied patch from Sebastian Reichelt to display IP in subject if hostname unknown (Closes: #288994)

 -- Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>  Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:00:54 +1000


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>