On Fri, May 15, 1998 at 04:09:34PM -0500, Rob Tillotson wrote:
>
> Greetings. I've just adopted an orphaned package (objpak), and I have
> a couple of questions about what I do next.
>
> 1. I assume that it would be a good idea to update the package to use
> debhelper, etc., and that there is no point in uploading it until
> I do. Am I right?
Using debhelper has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is
that it might reflect the policy better than maintainer created
makefiles when policy changes. Another advantage is that it _could_
be easier to maintain. The disadvantage is that the makefile
(speaking of debian/rules) is less flexible. Another one is that
the scripts do several things that might not be transparent to
the maintainer. Well, there's just right another, using debhelper
partially prevents the package from being compiled on other
architectures.[1]
Personally I don't like those helper packages as they always
do things I don't expect and are too inflexible - and they are
slow, of course. This doesn't hurt on fast machines but we still
have slow machines, as used by developers, and as architecture (m68k)
> 2. Assuming that all I do (at the moment) is fix up the current
> version, I should put it only in unstable, right? (It was
> orphaned and thus not present in frozen.)
If you fix the current version, i.e. fix the bugs mentioned in the
bugtracking system you are allowed to upload it into 'frozen unstable'
[1] We had this problem with binary-sparc where no new perl package
existed so all packages using debhelper couldn't be re-packaged
for the Sparc archtitecture.
Regards,
Joey
--
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