Re: where to put packages?
On Sun, 22 Oct 1995 23:16:12 -0600, Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> said:
> It was pretty easy for the 'watch' utility I packaged as my first
> attempt to choose 'misc', but if I submit to Bruce's arm-twisting
> and package some of my 29k cross-development tools, it almost seems
> like they'd deserve a new subdirectory like 'cross', or maybe
> 'embedded' (since they're for doing software for embedded systems?),
> and if I chose to package up the latest cut of dosemu which I just
> got working (fairly trivially, I might add), then it's not at all
> clear to me where to put it? Maybe "games", since DOS is just a
> toy? :-)
Dosemu should go in contrib. I discussed this with James MacLean (the
dosemu project coordinator) a while back and he felt that until a beta
version of dosemu is released, it would be best to keep it out of the
main Debian distribution. Also, Ian Murdock is (rightfully) concerned
about having any program in the main distribution that is known to
crash Linux. :-)
I've been trying to put a dosemu package together for quite some time
now. I'm glad you are interested since I've been too busy at school
to finish it. It's not trivial to do it *right*, though.
The biggest pain is the postinst script. It needs to step the
(probably naive) user through the basic configuration. It must either
help them set up their dos hard disk partition (and possibly cope with
stacker, doublespace, etc.), help them create a bootdisk floppy, or
help them create a bootable hdimage.
All of these require that the user actually HAVE a copy of MSDOS. Debian
cannot go around distributing Microsoft's command.com with the dosemu
package. The FREEDOS distribution is almost stable enough to be
included with dosemu, though. This will be a big help when it is
ready.
The dosemu package needs to be tight and well-maintained or it will
generate a high volume of traffic on debian-bugs. :-)
If you are interested, I can give you what I have so far.
--Mike
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