Re: Contradictions for new developers (Was: what are the latest debian packaging tools.
On Mon, 7 Sep 1998, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> Out of date documents, incomplete documents (the devscripts package which is
> not mentioned), documents which, according to Manoj, contradicts the policy,
> etc are the obstacles they encounter.
You're speaking out of my mind...
Of course there must be written reference. Providing that is not quite
enough though, as you can't really ask a new developer to check his
packages against a mighty pile of rules by hand - that's what we provide
lintian for.
The problem still is that lintian error messages are not always very
conclusive in terms of what to do to fix an error (like my recent problem
with explicitly linking -lc showed).
But actually it's hard enough getting the hang with the building process
itself: I am just starting to understand what debstd or debhelper
actually do - a new maintainer uses those tools in pretty much of a black
box fashion.
Thus a Debian-Packaging-Tools-HOWTO should at least cover the following:
+ Which tools are available/needed ?
+ A short introduction to their basic usage.
+ What are the processing steps during package building ?
Obviously the 'New-Maintainer's Debian Packaging Howto' and 'Creating a
Package using Debmake' cover some of this. Might be nice to unify them...
+ Which typical problems would one expect to encounter ?
+ What are the typical errors when packaging the first time ?
The last two points could be covered by the FAQ-o-matic, I'd say...
I'd be quite happy to take this on, but don't quite feel I would be up
to the job (also I honestly lack the time for it, as I am ).
It might be a far better choice to let one of the mentors do it who
produced a lot of packages already (unlike me...). Of course I'd be open
to consultation what it feels like to be a Debian newbie :-).
Regards,
/(__ __|\ Lars Steinke, Research Student @
( \/ __)_ www.fmf.uni-freiburg.de, Germany
) (_____ / for PGP PKey and WWW-Page finger
/___________/ steinke@mibm.ruf.uni-freiburg.de
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