1.2 source archive and packaging issues

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

With any luck, the 1.1 release announcement will go out on Sunday
evening. It's time to discuss 1.2 issues.

We will need to convert the filenames in the "unstable" archive to use
underscores rather than dashes as the delimiter. This should be done
starting about a week after the release, so that mirror systems have
had a chance to recover from the blow :-) . Since we're going to be
moving every file in "unstable" anyway, that sounds like a good time to
switch from "unstable" to a symbolic-linked directory (tentatively called
"rex"). Guy, you volunteered to do this last time before I aborted the
procedure - would you like to do it on or around June 24? Please coordinate
with Ian Jackson, as his scripts will no doubt need adjustment.

Subsequent to that, if you upload a package please make sure it generates
the files with underscores.

With ports on the horizon, we should be making sure that an automatic build
of Debian in its entirety is more than a _theoretical_ possibility. This means
that every package must have a .tar.gz file, and an .diff file if the package
is derived from upstream source. It should be possible to build the package
automaticaly by something like:

	tar xvlzf package_version.tar.gz
	cd package*
	./debian.rules binary
	cd ..
	dchanges <flags> package_version.${ARCHITECTURE}.deb

Currently, the above procedure might not work for packages like netbase and
netstd, which are extracted into the archive as directories full of
sub-package tar files. Probably those packages should go into the archive as
tar files like other packages.

Also, we should think about source packaging again. We are welcome to take
anything we want from RPM source packaging, if that would help.