Re: How package a binary library with unversioned soname?
Nikolaus Schulz <microschulz@web.de> writes:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 12:57:06AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> It would require that you make modifications to the upstream source,
>> probably. So will lots of other things, though. The only packages for
>> which I don't end up needing some sort of patch management system or
>> strategy for modifying the upstream source are ones for which I'm
>> upstream.
> Sorry, it's clear that I have to modify the source, and I have already
> done so. With "patch management system" I meant something like dpatch.
> Doesn't dumping several upstream tarballs in one Debian source package
> require something like that?
No, they're unrelated. Dumping unrelated tarballs together requires
repackaging the upstream source to create a custom .orig.tar.gz file,
documenting how you did that (I prefer doing so in debian/copyright), and
ideally creating a get-orig-source debian/rules target to redo the work on
an automated basis.
> Configuration files and undocumented binary data, probably describing
> internals of the supported printers. They seem to be read-only.
> I was just worrying about the directory name, because it might not
> comply with policy; especially since "bjlib" probably won't be the
> package name.
Policy doesn't require that /usr/lib subdirectories be named after the
package. It's just recommended because it makes it easier to figure out
what belongs to what without falling back on dpkg -S, and because it makes
conflicts less likely. If nothing else is using that directory now, I
don't expect it would be a problem.
> It is an awful mess, yes! And I've asked myself more than once if it's
> a sane idea to package this. But these drivers support printer models
> and model specific features for which, to my knowledge, no free
> alternative exists. And my impression is that many Debian and Ubuntu
> users already use these drivers anyway; either by "alienizing" the
> official Canon rpm's, or by installing the unofficial Debian packages at
> [1]. And even the latter don't even try to meet Debian standards.
> So I think, yes, there are many Debian users who need it; and I want to
> package it. Clearly this won't be a very nice package, but it will be
> an ugly package or no package at all. I just hope the thing will
> finally be good enough to both find a sponsor and have the ftp-masters
> wave it.
Okay. I don't have an opinion one way or the other -- I personally hate
printers, so I'm just commenting from a general Policy perspective.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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