hi jay, On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 12:27:33PM -0500, Jay Berkenbilt wrote: > From time to time, someone announces an intention to package some tiny > script or program, and people suggest including it in some other > package instead to avoid pollution of the archive with lots of tiny > packages. Although I understand the reasoning and the issues here > (additional overhead for each package), this has always bothered me a > little. I'm not sure that, as an upstream author, I would necessarily > want the debian version of my package to be bundled with other > software that was similar in functionality but otherwise unrelated to > my package. as an upstream author, you'd better be allright with it if you've released your software under a free-as-in-speech license. that's kind of the point of Free Software. of course, it goes without saying that any terms of the original work's copyright need to continue to be honored (as you mentioned there can't be any licensing conflicts). for most gpl-within-gpl situations, this simply means updating debian/copyright. > I've recently taken over maintenance of psutils and am gradually > working through the outstanding bugs on that package. A few of the > bugs suggest adding external programs. Assuming there are no other > impediments (like licensing problems), do people generally think that > it's reasonable to do this even if the other packages aren't really > part of the upstream package? If so, are there usual mechanisms for > doing this? What about version numbers? it really depends on the situation, i think, but ultimately it's your call for your packages. as for logistics of doing so, if it's an inclusion of a relatively small amount of code (a script or two) into another non-native/diff.gz package, i see no reason the version should percolate up to the debian package version. if you make modifications to the included program, finding some way to append debian-specific versioning information to the code itself would probably be good enough. as far as how to include the source in a non-native package, i would keep it in the diff and simply mention updates of said program in debian/changelog, and maybe elsewhere in /usr/share/doc/package. if it gets to be a lot of code, that's probably when it's due time to consider splitting it off into another package (someone else already gave such a suggestion). sean
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature