analysis of Nexenta's patches to dpkg

[Michael Schultheiss <schultmc@progeny.com>]

Hi,

I've been looking into Nexenta[1]'s changes to dpkg.

My findings are that they are not substantial.  Their dpkg is based on a
version (1.13.10) older than that currently in sid and etch (1.13.11).

There are three sets of changes that appear to be important

  1) Portability fixes for dselect and tarfn.c

  2) Adding solaris as an architecture

  3) Implementing obstack

I'd be happy to tidy up these changesets and submit them as wishlist
items to the BTS, but wanted to solicit review from the actual dpkg
developers first.

Here's a detailed breakdown of the changes I found between Debian's
1.13.10 package and Nexenta's.  You'll recognize the format as the
output of "diffstat" with comments interleaved.

 * Package versioning changes
 debian/changelog                     |   13

 * Build-Depends changes
 debian/control                       |    2

 * Disable start-stop-daemon, disable linker optimizations, dont'
   staticly link bzip2 and zlib
 debian/rules                         |   13
 
 * Portability fixes
 dselect/pkgdisplay.cc                |    2
 dselect/pkginfo.cc                   |   10
 dselect/pkgtop.cc                    |    4

 * Portability fixes, broken ncurses fix
 dselect/basecmds.cc                  |    4
 dselect/baselist.cc                  |   13

 * broken ncurses fix
 dselect/dselect.h                    |    2
 dselect/main.cc                      |    9

 * Move endif (for no reason?)
 getopt/getopt.c                      |    2

 * Externally driven changes (e.g. GNU bison)
 intl/plural.c                        | 1379 ++++++++++++----------

 * Add obstack implementation
 lib/Makefile.am                      |    5
 lib/Makefile.in                      |    9
 lib/obstack.c                        |    only
 src/Makefile.am                      |    6
 src/Makefile.in                      |    5

 * Portability fix
 lib/tarfn.c                          |    3

 * Add solaris as an architecture
 ostable                              |    1

 * Expand regex
 scripts/dpkg-architecture.pl         |    2

 * Allow gpg to be executed with --passphrase-fd for bulk operations
 scripts/dpkg-buildpackage.sh         |    4

 * Adjust regex
 scripts/dpkg-shlibdeps.pl            |    2

 * Add support for svn exported directories
 scripts/dpkg-source.pl               |    7

 * Remove ldconfig and update-rc.d from search, portability fixes
 src/help.c                           |   10

 * Expand error handling
 src/remove.c                         |    4

 48 files changed, 2321 insertions(+), 1304 deletions(-)

The entire diff is attached as "nexenta-dpkg.diff.gz"

[1] http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
Michael Schultheiss             Progeny Linux Systems, Inc.
E-mail: schultmc@progeny.com    http://www.progeny.com/