[DebianGIS] OpenLayers 2.5 Debian Packaging

[Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt@metacarta.com>]

Next in the lineup of things that maybe should be in Debian is
OpenLayers.

There's an outstanding ITP:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430359

It was opened in June, and has no further work. The author has not yet
responded to emails asking about his/her continued intentions.

I've put together a debian dir for it:

http://svn.openlayers.org/sandbox/crschmidt/debian/

I based this largely on http://packages.debian.org/sid/web/jpoker , a
Javascript Poker thingy, and YUI: http://packages.debian.org/sid/yui .

The package installs an apache 'site' config, but does not enable it by
default. The manpage for openlayers, as well as the README.Debian, have
instructions on how to enable the apache config. The package uses
doc-base in order to build a little documentation website for itself:
the result is available from http://64.92.170.181/doc/openlayers/. There
is a man page for OpenLayers, and a man page for the openlayers_build
tool, which allows users to build their own OpenLayers library for use
in their applications. (See http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/Profiles .)

A couple questions that I ran into:
 * Is the 'install an apache site' thing an accepted practice? I based
   that off the jpoker stuff, which the maintainer had set up upstream
   before he packaged it for debian. 
 
 * The build tool requires Python, but the OpenLayers package as a whole
   does not. I've added Python as a "Suggests:" and mentioned this
   requirement in the documentation, but this means that if someone
   doesn't have Python installed and they try to run it, they get the
   "No such file or directory" error. I don't want to make Python a
   dependancy, but I'd like to keep this all in one package. Am I wrong
   to do that? Should I make two binary packages -- one for openlayers,
   one for utils? 
   
   Thinking about it, that's probably the right way to go, so I'll go
   ahead and do that shortly. (This will be my first experience with a
   single source package creating ultiple binary pakages.) 
 
 * The build tool includes a shortened license text at the top of the
   single file builds, to comply with the licenses of the included
   software. It looks like
   http://svn.openlayers.org/trunk/openlayers/build/license.txt . I've
   included this file in the 'build' directory, and lintian is whining
   at me for having a second license file. Is this a warning that can
   safely be ignored, given the special circumstances here? Trying to
   turn the much longer
   http://svn.openlayers.org/sandbox/crschmidt/debian/copyright into the
   above is more pain than I'm interested in.
 
 * Right now, I'm stashing files like
   http://svn.openlayers.org/sandbox/crschmidt/debian/openlayers-apache-conf 
   into the debian directory -- is this how others who can't control
   their upstream package do it? (With TileCache, I'd probably just make
   an 'examples' directory and stash it there.)

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta