Re: Uploading to multiple distros

[Cristian Henzel <cristi@b3r3.info>]

I had this very same discussion with another packager and we came to the same
conclusion: changing stuff around a bit to make uploading to multiple
distributions easier, would greatly help packagers IMO.

One thing I would welcome, if possible, would be conditional build-deps, so that
you can set different build-deps for Debian/Ubuntu for example. I'm saying this
because my package for example depends on 'libappindicator-dev' in Ubuntu, but I
can't set this dependency in Debian, because that package doesn't exist there
(yet). Also, from what I've seen there are some packages which have different
names in Ubuntu/Debian, so a conditional build-depends might make
synchronisation of packages between different distributions a bit easier.
Now, one could also check how many packages actually *do* have different
build-depends fields in Ubuntu compared to Debian (not sure how I could do that)
to see how useful of an addition this would be.

For the changelog part, I thought *not* requiring a specific suite would also be
a good compromise. Then, in the case that a suite isn't specified, each
distribution would have a 'default' suite, where this package would be uploaded,
in Debian it might make sense to set 'sid' to default and in Ubuntu, the current
development version. Then, you only need to set a suite when you build the
package for a specific suite, and can have the 'default' package the same for
multiple distros.

-- 

Best regards,
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Cristian Henzel