On Mon, 29 Sep 2008, Charles Plessy wrote:
It is indeed necessary to do the development work on the unstable version of Debian, because this is where the binary packages will be compiled. Actually, for packages that are not too complex, it is often possible to do the development on testing or even stable. In that case, it is necessary to double-check that everything works fine on unstable as well. Some package, for instance many perl modules, provide regression tests that are ran at build time and that fit this role very well. For graphical applications, chroots or virtual machines are needed.
I might add that the pbuilder package provides a very reasonable access
to a chroot environment for building packages. If you are keen on keeping
your stable system and just want to build the package. In case of
biococoa this might be insufficient because testing under a graphical
environment seems to be required - but perhaps you can do the build on
your day to day computer running stable and test on a "not so important"
computer with unstable. (As a side note: current testing = Lenny will
be released in the near future and can be considered stable for most
applications.)
To clarify the issue with biococoa.app: I putted this package under
maintainership of the Debian Med packaging team because it was orphaned
(=not maintained by the initial maintainer any more) but is interesting
for the Debian Med project - so I wanted to keep it for the users of
Debian Med. I admit I'm really uneducated about the whole framework
and never had any experience with the gnustep framework. So I do not
really qualify to fix any problems which might occure which is actually
a quite bad situation. So I'm *really* happy that you are interested
in working on Debian packages and I would like to give any possible
support to enable you to build the packages successfully. Just do not
hesitate to ask here in any case.
Kind regards and thanks for your interest in Debian Med
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de