Re: ITP umoria, and general questions for a new developer

[Rene Weber <rene_deblist@elvenlord.com>]

    Hello Sean,

On Thu, Jun 01, 2000 at 11:30:24AM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote:
> 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.

    Ah, so nothing is official until the package actually gets uploaded, is
that right?  Thanks.

> what you want is suidregister.

    I'm sorry, I must have been unclear.  The package correctly restores
setuid permissions on install (although getting that working was a bit
annoying until I figured out dh_fixperms was being run for me and I had to
set exclusions).  I was wondering about the general acceptability of a
package that contains a setuid binary; I expected that kind of thing was at
least discouraged, especially from comments in the New Maintainer's Guide.
Luckily, some people later pointed me to the Policy Manual's mention of
this.

> 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.

    Cool.  I'll just cross my fingers and hope this compiles for the
architectures then.  :-)

> 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.

    Right, that makes sense.  I'm assuming that's not that difficult to do;
just follow the directions in the Developer's Reference, right?  There's no
review period or anything like that as far as I can tell.

> 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.

    Thanks for the tip.  There's a later message about a chrooted
alternative that I might explore, and I've been offered a shell on a real
potato/woody box, so this shouldn't be a significant problem.

    Thanks for the speedy reply and the hints.  It's greatly apreciated.

Rene Weber