Re: Getting close to releasing my first .deb's... What's next?
Tyler MacDonald <tyler@yi.org> writes:
> Okay... to make my intentions clear:
> I've been using debian now since 1999 and don't see myself
> changing distributions at any point in the future. I love debian. The
> first thing I do when I get a blank harddrive is install debian on it
> and I encourage all of my friends to do the same. (Yes, I looked at
> ubuntu briefly, but decided they weren't offering me anything that made
> it worth distancing myself from the core). I've been working on mod_bt
> for two years now, and the entire time the eventual end goal has been a
> debian package. One of my daydreams has been a special netboot image
> that quickly deploys a mod_bt-centric webserver running debian, just scp
> or ftp in your content and .torrents and it starts seeding. I don't want
> to exclude non-debian types from using mod_bt (in fact, I'm going to be
> looking into how to get it to work properly under win32 soon), but the
> primary target environment has always been debian. Whenever I am not the
> debian maintainer for mod_bt, I would accept patches from the maintainer
> to keep my debian/ tree in sync with what's actually needed, and/or give
> the maintainer commit access to the CVS tree where it's stored.
> So with that understood,
> 1. Do I still need to make it an ".orig" package, even if it will
> have a zero-byte diff?
> 2. Is having a "debian/" directory in the tarball such a bad thing?
> In a way, it advertises debian to anybody that downloads the source.
The general rule of thumb is that if there is any intention whatsoever
that the package be used on a platform other than Debian, the Debian
packaging and the upstream source should be separate. The Debian
packaging and the upstream source are often going to change independently;
there will be fixes for Debian (such as changes to the dependencies) that
won't result in any changes to the upstream source and for which there's
no reason to do a new upstream release. Also, including the debian
directory in the upstream release makes it somewhat harder to package,
since the packager has to worry about files that may not be accurate for
packaging changes and that have to be removed so that debhelper doesn't do
the wrong thing, which is hard to do with a diff.
I'm in the same boat as you and am unlikely to ever use something other
than Debian, but I made this separation for all of my packages. I
actually keep everything together in Subversion, including the debian
directory, but exclude the debian directory from the distribution and
build Debian packages by exporting the Debian directory from Subversion
over a virgin source untar.
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/notes/debian/build-tools.html>
has some additional details for how I do this personally.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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