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A full magazine under Debian?



Moi!
As you could have seen reading debian-changes, I have just uploaded five
.deb packages (and other four will follow) as the debianized version of
PLUTO Journal, the on-line magazine of Pluto Linux Users Group (in
Italian!).

I have written some perl scripts to help me in this effort and I have
made them a separate package, "journal-dev", in the hope that also other
magazines could be debianized (L'Echo de Linux, for example).

The index.html file is build on-the-fly by the postinst/postrm stages
and though it doesn't appear in the Contents file :-(

I have explained this, and other solutions that I chose, in a document
included in the packages as NOTE.

I would like to hear your comments about this (please be kind! :-), so I
attach the file to this message.

ciao,
Fabrizio
-- 
P.S. oh, I forgot that I've already done what I suggested in [4]. oops
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Note about pj-base - Pluto Journal 
Last modification: Sun, 27 Oct 1996 09:53:24 +0200

How this works?

The idea was to have a single index page per year, but (as suggested 
by Bruce Perens) each issue had to be released as a single debian
package, and packages (issues) could be installed and removed in every
order, without crossed dependencies.

So I decided to put "sources" in the .deb package and to "make" the
issue with postinst and postrm scripts.[1] In this way the index is
built on the fly assembling toghether the available parts: an header, 
a part that comes from each issue and a footer.

Every issue contains two versions of its index: a "full" one, to be 
used when the issue is available, and a "blind" one, without any link,
to be used after the issue has been removed.[2] In this way you can
install an issue, read it and then remove it, and you will still be
able to see its contents in the index, for later reference. It could 
be great to put a radio button on the blind index to let a cgi-script
re-install the issue on demand.

The wrapper package pj-base builds the hierarchy
(/usr/doc/pluto-journal) and installs some scripts under /usr/sbin.[3]

The hierarchy under pluto-journal/ has:
- the index.html file (build during postinst of pj-base, postinst and
  postrm of each issue;
- the subdir images/ containing the image files needed by index.html;
- the subdir .indexes/ containing the most recent version of the 
  header and the footer for index.html, a copy of the "blind" part of
  the index for each issue that has been disinstalled, and a copy of
  the "full" part of the index for each issue that is currently
  available installed (the reason for that is that in this way the
  postinst of an "early" issue can rebuild the index without loosing
  informations about "later" issues);
- a subdir for each issue of the year, named pj96n??/ containing:
-       the html files of the articles (the filenames for these are
        free),
-       a subdir images/ containing the images needed by the articles.

The package pj-base is a requisite for each issue (that depends on 
it), and suggests the virtual package pj-issues, wich is provided by
each issue. In this way dselect will propose to install at least one
issue.

The source package can be used to create a different on-line magazine,
because it never say it is for Pluto-Journal.[4]

This will be documented here, in future. (raise a bug if you need it!)

Another possible enhancement would be the automatic detection of the
presence of httpd and the creation of a symlink pointing to the 
pluto-journal hierarchy, maybe asking the user for the point in the
webspace to put the symlink in.  I don't know if this could be a good
idea (TM) or simply another unwanted stop in the installation process.

email fpolacco@debian.org or (better?) debian-devel@lists.debian.org 
to discuss these matters.


----------------------------------------------------------------

[1]     The file index.html, build in the postinst stage of each issue
        AND the postinst of pj-base, is removed by hand in the prerm
        of pj-base. This could create a subtle problem when upgrading
        the pj-base package. I haven't tryed it yet, but I suppose
        that during upgrade of pj-base the ''blind'' part of the index
        will disappear.

[2]     I will create a script to comment out all anchors in the full
        index, building the ''blind'' one on the fly, but the problem
        of [1] could not disappear.

[3]     I haven't jet created manpages for them, maybe I should raise
        a bug against myself :-)

[4]     Except in its name ;-) Maybe I could split it in two creating
        pj-dev or using a more generic name like "journal-dev". This
        will solve the undeclared dependence of each debian/rules in
        libwww-perl required for latin-1 processing.

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