Questions for maintaining several packages

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

Hello

I want to start maintaining the following packages:

1) xteddy

   Xteddy is a cuddly teddy bear for your X Windows desktop.
   It is more or less an excersise for package bundling and
   maintaining.
   In fact xteddy is a must have for any Linux distribution :-))

2) wordnet

  * Wordnet 1.5 disapeared from hamm.
    Because the old maintainer (see below) didn't give me any
    answer about the reason I decided to tako over this package.
  * I started from scratch with version 1.6.
  * added automake stuff to the original source
  * Patched wnconsts.h to define DEFAULTPATH and DEFAULTBIN via
    compile option rather than #define in this file
  * I decided to put it in text like spell programs an dictionaries
    (*** may be there should be a new dictionary section in Debian ***)
  * I can't verify if dict/index.sense isn't used by the programs
    and so I included it in my package (see remark of Ioannis Tambouras
    in his first release)


I have certain problems with wordnet:
  - I can't manage the multipackage building process.
    Is there any hint on splitting packages over three different
    *.deb files?
  - There is a problem with automake.
    my configure.in contains the lines
       ...
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(DEFAULTPATH, "${prefix}/lib/wordnet")
       AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(DEFAULTBIN, "${prefix}/bin")
       ...
    This should produce in the resulting Makefile
    
       -D${prefix}/lib/wordnet -D${prefix}/bin
    
    but if configure is invoked without any arguments
    
       -DNONE/lib/wordnet -DNONE/bin
    
    and if a prefix was given (configure --prefix=/usr)
    
       -D/usr/lib/wordnet -D/usr/bin             .
    
    So I inserted a quick hack into configure which enforces
    --prefix argument.  How to do this sane? Unfortunately the
    use of AC_DEFINE didn't help because than '$', '{' and '}'
    are quoted.
    
  - A last but not so importand problem is, what to do if a file
    should be stored as a symbolic link in the source distribution
    when doing "make dist".  The reason is that the Name of the
    file for copying conditions was LICENSE and automake requires to
    have a file named COPYING.  I consider it to be annoying to have
    two files of the same contents and made a symbolic link, but this
    resulted in two files after "make dist".

3) A free English dictionary (www.dict.org).

   I found a hint on

       http://www.debian.org/doc/prospective-packages.html
    
   that such a dictionary exists and is desired to be included
   into Debian.  Is there any effort on this?  I would think
   about maintaining this package.

4) Some time ago I found a English-German dictionary at 

      ftp://ftp.th-darmstadt.de/pub/dicts/german/german-english.tar.Z
      
   assembled by 
      
      Tobias Oetiker <tobias@ife.ee.ethz.ch> and
      Joachim Schrod <schrod@iti.informatik.th-darmstadt.de>

   In my oppinion this could give a good starting point for creating
   a bilingual interface but needs some further investigation.
   
   Is there an interest to put such stuff into Debian distribution?
   I have some ideas what could be done but no time to implement this.

5) I would like to support the CIRC package, which serves TeX-macros
   for drawing elektrical circuits. (CTAN: macros/generic/diagrams/circ)

In general I think it would be a good idea to make the control files
of a debian package available in the source tree to give new maintainers
a huge set of examples.

Regards

       Andreas
       


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