Throwaway -dev package?
I have debiannized syslogread and qlogtools from http://untroubled.org/
(both individually lintian free) and hope to start newmaint process.
However, I ran into a sticky situation regarding upstream's source. (And
this may affect some of his packages already in the archive, such as
nullmailer, cvm, and ezmlm-browse.) In newer revisions of his software,
Bruce is starting to use a library of common routines he calls "bglibs".
By default bglibs wants to install in /usr/local/bglibs/{include,lib}.
There it installs a bunch of .h files at root namespace level and .a
files, likewise. Many of these have, what I would consider potentially
"common" names (such as "uint32.h"). Because they are archives, the
libraries are only needed at Build-Depends time. So, I see three
different solutions, where I have already for the purposes of my
packaging taken path "1":
1) Make a libbglibs-dev package (with no corresponding libbglibs1
package) that installs in /usr/bglibs and very lightly patch the
other packages to reflect the new path. This keeps patchs to upstream
code all around very very minimal, and as mentioned above, this
package is only needed by myself and the autobuilders. It does,
however, not pass lintian (befause of a non-FHS directory), and
*might* be considered cruft in the archive. Like I said, this is what
I've done so far as it is certainly the easiest route. Perhaps this
option could be modified to use a path more like
/usr/lib/bglibs/{include,lib} to keep everybody happy? I'd hate for
lintian maint's to put in an exception for this one weird package.
2) Include bglibs with every package that needs it. There is, at
present, only the one package that needs bglibs. However, I get the
impression that Bruce will be using his library more and more in the
future, particularly with cvm. So this may affect other dd's.
Certainly this would be a pretty heavy-weight solution. Plus, I have
no idea how to include two tgz's in one package build... :-)
3) Patch bglibs to install in /usr/include/bglibs/ and /usr/lib/bglibs/.
This would seem "most general", assuming anybody but Bruce ever
wanted to use his libraries. However, it would require fairly
extensive patching to upstream packages.
I've tracked debian-devel for over a year now. I've tweaked existing
packages quite a bit and I've written a few small private packages here
and there. This is the first set of software that I've wanted to
actually go through newmaint to become a maintainer for. But, wouldn't
you know it, despite being really clean upstream source in nearly every
other respect, there's this curveball. :-)
Many thanks for input.
--
chris jantzen kb7rnl =-> __O
Insert witty comment here. _`\<,_
http://www.maybe.net/ (*)/ (*)
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