Ported package - now what?

["Jason M. Felice" <jfelice@cronosys.com>]

So I've ported the current version of apt (it turns out to be a five
line modification to one of the makefiles), now what do I do?  I'm not a
debian developer, so I'm not familiar with the drill.

Obviously, I'm going to send the patch to the maintainer.  Is there some
place to upload a binary? Do I need to be a debian developer to do so?
Should I post patches to a list?

And yes, normally I'd make sure no-one else is working on the package,
but I was the first thing I came across when I was trying to figure out
the Hurd.  I apologize if I've stepped on anyone's toes.

On another note, apt-get currently refuses to work because of broken
dependencies (although I tested http transfers with `apt-get update
update', and it seems to be reading packages fine).  The dependencies in
question are dpkg-dev (vs. dpkg-hurd-dev).  I'm wondering if there are
any plans on folding the dpkg-hurd changes into dpkg, and if not, why
and what would I need to do?

And on yet another note, how do some perl scripts to generate a graph of
package statuses for the hurd-i386 port sound?  It would retreive the
ls-lR.gz from a debian mirror and show broken dependencies, out-of-date
packages needing rebuilding.  I would also maintain a
hurd-packager-to-package listing and known issues per package if this
information is useful.

Thanks to all involved in producing such a neat system,
-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice