Re: packaging Rivet

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

Hi Massimo,

On Tuesday 21 September 2010, Massimo Manghi wrote:
> After some efforts to tame the effects of debhelper scripts I got a
> libapache2-mod-rivet that installs quite gently.
> 
> I managed to satisfy all of the lintian requirement except for the
> warning
> 
> W: libapache2-mod-rivet: new-package-should-close-itp-bug
> 
> since I'm not a Debian maintainer I cannot close the itp-bug that
> after all I never opened (??). I don't even know how to open a bug
> against a package that doesn't exist yet.

Basically it means that maybe you should open an ITP bug that tells 
other people that your are working on the pacakge. You can then close 
the bug by including "Closes: #..." in the changelog. The ITP bug is 
filed against the wnpp pseudo-package, try "reportbug wnpp".

> I have 2 questions: one of general interest (please, don't blame me
> for not posting it on debian-mentors) and another more specific to
> Debian Apache.
> 
> 1) Rivet ships an html manual whose .png files are stored in
> subdirectory of the manual root. I tried dh_installdocs in various
> ways (eg dh_installdocs -a doc/html/* doc/html/images/*) but each
> and every file in the directory tree doc/html gets copied in the
> same directory, thus spoiling the pages that include graphics

I don't know. Maybe look into another package that installs several 
docs sub-dirs. Or ask at debian-mentors ;-)


> 2) In the process of building the package dpkg-buildpackage
> complains with the message:
> 
> dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: debian/libapache2-mod-
> rivet/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_rivet.so contains an unresolvable
> reference to symbol ap_log_assert: it's probably a plugin.
> dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: 65 other similar warnings have been
> skipped (use -v to see them all).
> 
> It never occured to me to see this warning during the ordinary
> build of Rivet. Since it's related to a symbol of the Apache core
> I thought this is the best place where the question has to be put.
> Can I live with this message or something has to be fixed either
> in the code or in the package?

This has to do with the way Apache (or rather libtool) builds the 
shared library. There is nothing you can do about it. It can be safely 
ignored.

Cheers,
Stefan