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Re: gerris/gts: lots of doubts...



On Mon, 2008-05-26 at 00:09 -0500, Ruben Molina wrote:
> Looking at the upstream website, I found that maintainer decided 2 years
> ago, to change his release policies, so he is not releasing stable
> tarballs anymore, and this two packages (and a new one, related) are
> available as daily snapshots. The upstream is very active, and latest
> changes on gerris just two weeks ago.

So how often are you proposing to upload packages (or seek to upload via
a sponsor)?

What criteria are you going to use to determine whether the snapshot on
27th May 2008 is "sufficiently improved" compared to the one on 2nd June
2008? (Note that even this interval is too short - you'd have to allow
at least 10 days, more like 14, to have any chance of getting the
packages into testing.

Monthly? Quarterly + bug fixes ?

> Upstream provides debian/ubuntu snapshot packages, automatically
> generated. 

Cannot be used - you would need to convince upstream to only create
packages when the codebase has been "sufficiently improved" to warrant a
new version. Quite what that means for each package is open to debate
but, generally, there should be less releases of the library and more of
the application. (Libraries are always more complex to package.)

> Surely, this packages needs some work to be compliant with
> debian policies, but I don't know if I should try to work on this with
> upstream, because this packages aren't stables anyway.  I need some help
> with your opinions...

Offer to join in upstream and take on the burden of making the upstream
releases? Not necessarily as "stable" tarballs but at least not daily
snapshots. Find out why he changed policy - it may simply be a lack of
time in which case an extra person to do that work may be the solution.

> This package includes: libgts-0.7-5, libgts-dev, and libgts-doc. After
> some work I finally got an *almost* clean lintian output.

lintian isn't the be-all and end-all of Debian packaging. Have you built
any *working* packages?

(If solely being lintian clean was the sole criterion for uploading,
there would be endless amounts of pre-pre-alpha code in Debian. It's
actually very easy to make an empty package that is lintian clean - it's
the bits in between that cause the work.)
:-)

> But I need help on this. How can I create this new target package move
> binaries and manpages to it? 

A package split? Not that hard - ensure you get the Replaces: and
possibly Conflicts: correct and then move lines between foo.install and
bar.install. (You are using debhelper? If not, do so.)

> Anyway, should I work in this outdated
> stable?

No. Only work with working packages - both ends.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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