Re: New packaging advice, manpages and binary additions
First, I'm not a DD, just I try to maintain some packages. So don't take
my advices as facts.
Robin Cornelius wrote:
> Hi everyone, trying to create a new debian package but have a few
> queries. I'm trying to create a new package for an app that i use that
> I would like to see in debian, and hopefully in the longterm become a
> DD. I have not yet filed a ITP on WNPP.
>
> The first issue i had was getting my man page to be found in the
> debianised source. I could not find this documentation anywhere but it
> seems that just having my manpage named debian/qavimator.6 was not
> enough i had to also have a file debian/manpages that lists the
> manpages to be included, eg contained "debian/qavimator.6". Have i
> just misunderstood the documentation (new maintainers guide and policy
> reference), or have there been changes to dh_installman ?
Seems you are doing it right, to me.
> Second issue is how do I add a binary file, eg an icon (xpm), to the
> source tree?. The applicaiton is a X11 QT app and so it would be nice
> to have a menu icon but upstream does not have one. Clearly the ideal
> situation is to get upstream to add one but untill that happens is it
> possible to just add an icon to the source tree with out
> "unrepresentable changes" messages when running dpkg-buildpackage ?
If you look in the archive of this list, you will see a thread talking
about including binaries in the debian diff.gz. One of the way is to
create a file encoded with uuencode. Have a look there, it's quite
extensive. But by the way, .xpm files are text based, no?
> What is the correct policy for doing this? Do i need to split the
> package into 2 for arch independent and dependent, the amount of data
> is very small so it did not seem worth while.
If the data are small, I don't see the point of doing it.
> One final thing, upstream only has a SVN tree, it is not making
> tarball releases. Is this an issue?
One of the issue I see is that there wont ever be any working watch file
in your project. That's for sure.
> I can try to work with them to see
> if they will do it, but if not should i create a "friendly fork?"
>
> Many thanks for advise
>
> Robin
A fork only to have a tarball on a site? I don't think this is needed. I
don't know what to do in that case, but I would just create a
orig.tar.gz with the date of the checkout in the name of the archive,
and talk about it maybe in a README.Debian.
Thomas
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