RE: ITP umoria, and general questions for a new developer
> So, my first question is how do I pick up a package that hasn't been
> orphaned? In my reply to the current developer, I asked him if he could
> orphan it, but he hasn't replied yet, and he may not know the procedure
> anyways. Is it possible for me to grab it from him based on his private
> mail to me and the fact that it is so old?
>
simply place your name as maintainer in the control file and make sure your
name is the one listed in the changelog for the version you release.
> Also, umoria is (to my reading) non-free. The licence forbids it from
> being used in a commercial manner (see below for an excerpt from my
> debian/copyright file). Is this a problem? The binary is also setuid
> (games). I can probably change the source so it's just setgid, but I
> haven't done that yet. Is that ok?
>
what you want is suidregister.
> Beyond these, I have some general questions about developing for/under
> Debian that I haven't found explicitly mentioned in the docs (although there
> are so many of them I've only gone through them once, so I might very well
> have missed something): (1) porting to other platforms is not (necessarily)
> my job, right? Can/should I help out in this regard? When I become a
> Debian developer, I will presumably have access to machines on other
> architectures -- should I take care of porting in that case? (2) What is
> the difference between a Debian developer and a Debian maintainer? Is a
> developer just anyone with a package in the distribution (once
> identification verified etc as in the Developer's Reference), even if it was
> mentorized?
>
when you upload a package for i386, the other architectures will recieve it and
have it auto-compiled. if it fails, they will contact you. if you know that
something is i386 only, specify that in the arch and do not worry about porting
it.
a maintainer is one with a package in the system and a key in the debian
keyring. maintainer and developer or pretty much interchangeable. You are not
a member of Debian until you are accepted by New Maintainer and have a key in
the keyring.
> (3) I have slink (stable) installed on my debian machines, so of course
> umoria is compiled against older libraries. Is this a problem? I can
> upgrade one of the machines to unstable if necessary, but that machine is a
> lot slower, so I'd really rather not. (4) Also because I'm only running
> slink, the only GPG available to me (packaged, that is) is an ancient one
> (version 0.4.3-1) which I really don't want to run. Hopefully this won't be
> an issue soon because potato will be out, but is it otherwise a problem?
>
you have to update to at least potato. Soon to woody. Either that or all
compilations of your package will have to be done on debian boxes. If you are
not running current Debian, development will NOT be easy. In potato there are
more packaging docs available.
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