Novice to Debian packaging
Hello there,
I'm trying to prepare my first Debian package of a library of mine. I
exchanged a couple mails with Ludovic some eons ago, where he gave me some
useful pointers.
The intent is to eventually submit this library as a candidate for
inclusion, if deemed of interest. More precisely, I'm trying to package the
Player-Ada [1] binding to the Player (robot-player package) library.
I'm reading lots of documentation about Debian packaging, Ada policy,
debhelper, CDBS, git-buildpackage, etc. At the moment I'm a bit overwhelmed
but not (yet?) entirely lost.
I'm using git-buildpackage, have everything ready and am at the point of
experimenting with the actual package creation. I'm looking at some Ada
packages for ideas. I see that there are several helper tools for
debian/rules, and I see different mechanisms being used to support it. E.g.,
libgmpada and libtexttools have a suite of ALDH.* files; opentoken has
*.debhelper files; libxmlada and ada-reference-manual seem more hand-made.
Here's where I am currently stuck and where I'd like your advice as Ada
packagers.
While reading about CDBS I got the fear that I could be wasting time in
something that is not really needed when packaging Ada programs, like
autotools is not usually necessary thanks to gnat project files. So I
wanted, as the first of my questions, to know if this is so or not, and what
would you recommend as the supporting infrastructure for debian/rules.
There are lots of tutorials for packaging beginners, but usually these stick
to the author's workflow of choice, and I haven't found a clear comparison
between alternatives. Also some of these are, while seemingly still valid,
possibly somewhat outdated in regard to recent developments. E.g. I see
different compat values (which everybody is happy to dismiss as "you don't
need to understand this yet") that tell me that I might be reading stale
information.
Finally, since Ada devs are in the minority (I hope to contribute to improve
this ;-)), I sorely miss an Ada-oriented tutorial, which would help in
identifying which things arise from "C culture" that would be best avoided
when dealing with Ada (although at the moment I think this is only a minor
point related to building binaries). Am I missing something here or is it
simply that there is not one? (perhaps because it isn't necessary).
Anyway, thanks a lot for your patience with this long mail. Back to reading,
Álex.
[1] https://github.com/mosteo/player-ada
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