Re: MediSnap - GPLv3 medical photo system - just released
Hi Jan,
On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 01:58:12PM +0100, Jan Kechel wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'm proud to announce the public release of the medical photo
> system: MediSnap
>
> http://medisnap.sourceforge.net/index.html
Cool. There was some rumor made by Karsten here on this list. :-)
> I'd also like to create an official debian package out of this.
That's really great. While I'm really keen on pushing such important
packages my spare time does not permit to work on them on my own but it
has shown in the past that working together with people who have a close
connection to upstream (or beeing upstream themselves) can be quite
successful.
I'm not aware in how far you are familiar with Debian packaging details
and the procedure how the package finally reaches the official Debian
packaging pool. The latter is done usually by "sponsering" the package
by an official Debian Maintainer and I'm perfectly willing to do this
for you.
Regarding the technical details: In the Debian Med team we prefer to
maintain packages as a team and we have written a policy[1] which might
help you to do the first steps. These first steps include creating an
account on the main developer machine for Debian packages
alioth.debian.org. To get your account up and running for accessing the
VCS there it has turned out to be a good idea to read[2]. Once you are
done with it (if not feel free to ask here) just ask for inclusion as
Debian Med team member which will grant you commit permissions to Debian
Med SVN and Git. For your actual work you might choose one of them at
your preference. For simple packages (regarding the structure of the
debian/ directory with only a few if at all patches) using SVN has
turned out to be a usual choice but feel free to use Git if you prefer.
Once you are done with this you should probably have a look into packages
which are quite similar.
> In the end its just a java-program that talks to a postgresql database.
While I'm myself definitely no Java expert and have very view experience
with packaging java stuff I have some hints for you to investigate what
packaging tool might fit best. If you are using Maven you might like
to have a look into the following packages
maven-repo-helper - Helper tools for including Maven metatada in Debian packages
maven-ant-helper - helper scripts for building Maven components with ant
maven-debian-helper - Helper tools for building Debian packages with Maven
and seek for these on wiki.debian.org. We also do have a mailing list
which assembles a bunch of kind Java packaging experts[3] which are
usually very helpful if it is about details. Just do not hesitate to
ask here first and we might redirect more complex problems to the Java
maintainers list.
> So this would probably the only dependencies. What i don't know is
> whether i should automatically create the database (which password?) or
> if a simple README with instructions and the sql init file would be
> enough? What's the preferred way to do this?
As I suggested in the other mail dbcommon-config might be a reasonable
choice. However, to keep things simple in the beginning of the
packaging I would concentrate on moving all files right into place first
(for instance providing some SQL scripts in /var/lib/medisnap) and
describe the procedure how to setup the database in debian/README.Debian.
Once this is done we might proceede with more advanced techniques while
enabling the first testers using the package with manual database setup.
Kind regards and thanks for your interest in Debian Med
Andreas.
[1] http://debian-med.alioth.debian.org/docs/policy.html
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/SSH
[3] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-java-maintainers
--
http://fam-tille.de
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