The news are collected on http://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews Feel free to contribute. Advice on quilt usage and compatibility with new source format -------------------------------------------------------------- To prepare a future switch to the "3.0 (quilt)" source package format, I tried to convert the whole archive and to rebuild the packages afterwards. This resulted in lots of improvements on dpkg-source as I adapted the code to make it support many of the existing build setups but not all problems could be fixed on the dpkg-source side. I filed a bunch of bugs[1] for packages that need additional changes. To ensure compatibility with the new source format, please try to follow the guidelines below. For packages already using quilt: * Make sure that all patches apply with -p1 (and not -p0). This is the default in quilt but some manually imported patches are only applicable with -p0 (and this option is forced in the series file). This can be done with quilt refresh (more on this below (*)). * Make sure that the quilt patches don't modify/create/delete files within the debian directory. * Make sure that the .diff.gz doesn't contain cruft related to auto-generated/updated files (like config.guess/sub, see #482716[2] to avoid this). The upstream changes in the .diff.gz are like a new patch at the end of the quilt series. It must be possible to unapply it during "debian/rules clean" and to reapply it just before "debian/rules build". * Don't hand-edit patches. If you do it nevertheless, please "quilt refresh" them to ensure that the various offsets in the patches are right. * Store the patches in debian/patches/ and the series file as debian/patches/series. * Don't override the location of the ".pc" directory. * Don't reinvent rules to apply/unapply patches, but rely on /usr/share/quilt/quilt.make that you can include from debian/rules. * If you use CDBS, use /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/patchsys-quilt.mk but don't change the top level source directory with DEB_SRCDIR (or change it but apply patches from the top-level directory anyway by setting DEB_QUILT_TOPDIR to "."). For other packages: * Don't keep the quilt series file if you stopped using quilt in your source package. * Avoid tarball in tarball, dpkg-source can't apply patches if the source files are not available directly after extraction of the .orig tarball. (*) Use this small recipe to refresh all the patches. This will ensure they are fully correct and will be applicable with "patch -p1". quilt pop -a; while quilt push; do quilt refresh -p1; done Note that you can also use quilt refresh -pab if you prefer fake top-level directory names (those have the advantage not to change when the directory name changes. Directories for source package typically have the upstream version embedded). -- Raphaël Hertzog [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?archive=0;tag=3.0-quilt-by-default;repeatmerged=1;users=hertzog@debian.org [2] http://bugs.debian.org/482716 update-grub starts using UUIDs by default ----------------------------------------- Latest versions of update-grub (0.97-40 in GRUB Legacy and 1.96+20080601-2 in GRUB 2) start using filesystem UUIDs by default. Although only GRUB 2 uses them internally for fetching its own files, both of them detect the UUID of your root filesystem and pass that to Linux in the "root" parameter. In GRUB Legacy, this change affects only generation of "kopt" parameter when no previous menu.lst existed. If you have an existing menu.lst and are only updating it, your kopt will remain unmodified. Since this means only new installs will be affected, it would be preferable if existing installs explicitly tested this functionality by renaming menu.lst and re-running update-grub, so that serious problems (if any exists) can be detected in time before the freeze. -- Robert Millan wxwidgets2.8 upload to unstable ------------------------------- Adeodato Simó recently uploaded wxwidgets2.8[3] to unstable. This is a long requested update, but package maintainers are encouraged to be conservative about using it: Only packages that don't work with wxwidgets2.6[4] should use the new version, stability and new bug issues are expected to happen when switching too fast. This is also the reason behind the decision to keep wxwindows2.6 as default for Lenny[5]. Testing with the new widgetset for such applications that still would work with wxwindows2.6 should happen in private or experimental before decisions are done. -- Gerfried Fuchs [3] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/wxwidgets2.8 [4] http://packages.debian.org/source/sid/wxwidgets2.6 [5] http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny Volunteers needed to handle update of release notes --------------------------------------------------- Frans Pop has acted as the lead editor for the Sarge and Etch release notes but recently resigned from this task[6]. For the Lenny release notes a new team of editors is needed, but so far no one has stepped up to work on that. This is a good opportunity for non-developers to help while working in close coordination with the release team. Feel free to join and start acting on the open bugs[7]. -- Raphael Hertzog [6] http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc/2008/05/msg00008.html [7] http://bugs.debian.org/release-notes -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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