Re: **** ARCHIVE MOVED TO MASTER SITE ****

[Juergen Menden <menden@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>]

[ i forward this to Ian and Bill Mitchell, who is the maintainer of the
dchanges package. Hello to both! ;-) ]

Dominik Kubla wrote lately:
> 
> i will continue to forward all
> uploads to master.debian.org.

this would really be very nice. thank you.
for me it's impossible to get a stable ftp
connect to master.debian.org.

> > [dchanges files, pro's and con's]
> > so in the long term these packages won't require any
> > m68k specific changes either. So, I don't see any sense in doing this.
> 
> But there is! The debian changes fill contains md5 checksums of the packages,
> so that their integrity can be checked! 

well i can see this. nevertheless there are some points which make the
current dchanges package useless for us:
 - it _requires_ a sources .tar.gz file. we normally simply recompile
   the packages for our non-intel arch, so a --binary-only option,
   which at least doesn't include the source archive in the Files
   part, would be nice.
 - the Priority and the Changes sections should be copied from the
   source package, normally they simply don't change, at least the
   possible important source changes (such as security-fixes) mustn't
   be forgotten. the final call of the editor makes it possible to
   edit these fields if really necessary. 
   [...]
   but this would require the maintainers of the sources to add this
   information in some debian.* files. (Ian?)
 - a Binary-Architecture field must be added which reflects the
   architecture of the binary package (intel, m68k, sparc, alpha and
   generic, the doc and the manpages packages at least are generic,
   i've installed them without any problems) 
 - another field Source-Architecture should be set to generic by
   default. This field is needed as there _are_ some packages which
   will surely _never_ be _ported_ to another arch (syslinux, lilo, ...)
   they'd rather be totally rewritten for other archs.

an examples (taken from dchanges(5) and edited):
   Date: Sat Aug 26 12:14:32 PDT 1995
   Source: bc
   Source-Architecture: generic
   Binary: bc dc
   Binary-Architecture: m68k
   Version: 1.03­8
   Maintainer: Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>
   Description:
     bc: An arbitrary precision calculator language.
     dc: An arbitrary precision reverse­polish calculator.
   Priority: Routine
   Changes:
    This is a Changes field extension.
    Each line is indented by a single space character.
    .
    The line above indicates a blank line.
   Files
    ­rw­r­­r­­ 1 root root 36046 Oct 21 08:24 bc­1.03­8.deb
    ­rw­r­­r­­ 1 root root 20782 Oct 21 08:25 bc­1.03­8.m68k.diff.gz
    ­rw­r­­r­­ 1 root staff 6050 Sep 28 18:20 dchanges­1.0­10.deb
    a784e82d6a6c684618fd11bb6a4de300 bc­1.03­8.deb
    293bb2e6033eeeaf685c03c30baef822 bc­1.03­8.diff.m68k.gz
    1ac1ed1dff4cfb69a699f5c69fcff179 dc­1.03­8.deb
The source is a generic one, the binary packages are compiled for the
m68k, Priority and Changes are taken from the source-package, due to a
given --binary-only flag the .tar.gz file is not included in Files. 

the (optional) bc-1.03-8.m68k.diff.gz file reflect the changes
relative to the bc-1.03-8.tar.gz source package which are needed to
compile on m68k-linux machines. surely these diffs should be included
in an upcomming bc-1.03-9 package, therefore they must be forwarded
to the maintainer (or even better to debian-bugs), either
automagically, or by hand the creator of the diff. ;-)

jjm

-- 
Juergen Menden                   | Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by me, 
tel:    +49 (89) 2105 - 2387     +-----------+ are (usually) not the opinions 
e-mail: menden@informatik.tu-muenchen.de     | of anyone else on this planet.

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