Re: Gnome to be removed from debian?

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

wcurry@cts.com writes:

> Second, I would really like to see properly functioning debian
> directories in each of the CVS module directories.  If the
> Debian maintainers would send their debian directory as a patch
> to the upstream maintainer of that module, then it would
> accomplish making it easier for Debian users to test, without the
> burden of providing a .deb for the weekly snaps.

Actually, I'm able to commit the changes myself.  The problem is
keeping them up-to-date though.  The stuff in the debian/ directory
will almost always be a release behind - so there isn't much point in
putting it in the tarballs generated by "make dist".  And it's of
limited value for people who are following CVS.  I'm leaning towards
removing the debian/ directories from the Gnome CVS entirely.

> The only question I have about it (since I don't maintain a package
> myself yet) is how can we make it easy to locate Gnome 
> packages in a place like /opt/gnome  while they are still
> unstable?  If I run ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnome  
> before running debian/rules, will the debian build process use
> it, or overwrite it?

Here's my plan (for the Debian snapshots project):

 - store all the debian/ directory stuff in a CVS repository (possibly
   on master or va)

 - in all the packages I made, the debian/ directory is independent - if
   you look at the .diff.gz files for the Gnome packages I made - you'll
   notice I went to great lengths to ensure that no files outside of the
   debian/ directory are in the .diff.gz.  This means you can apply those
   .diff.gz files directly to the source (using zcat ../*.diff.gz |
   patch -p1) without worrying about the patch failing (providing the
   debian/ directory is empty).

 - for the snapshots program, we'll generate source packages regularily
   from the Gnome CVS + the debian/ directories from the Gnome snapshots
   CVS.  In my packages, I have a debian/debconfigure script which
   adapts the packaging scripts depending upon what type of package
   it is.  The snapshots packages install under /opt/snapshots.

I'm going to work on this a bit more later today.  I hope to get some
binary packages out so that people will know where I'm coming from...

Cheers,

 - Jim