Re: Use of hfsprogs in Ubuntu

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

Hi, Morten.

Sorry for the very late reply.

To reach a wider audience, I'm Cc'ing the people at debian-powerpc (to
which I am subscribed), debian-68k (which probably has people with HFS+
filesystems), debian-amd64 (which possibly has people with newer Apple
systems) and debian-mentors (which probably has someone that would like to
get started packaging something with a patch system and that involves
portability issues).

On May 16 2008, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> Rogério Brito wrote:
> > I would like to ask you two things:
> >
> > 1 - would it be possible to upgrade the package from the Debian
> >     repository?
> 
> Packages in Ubuntu are synchronized with packages from Debian/unstable at 
> regular intervals. At the moment, packages are getting sync'ed into
> Intrepid.

It seems that hfsprogs revision -4 has already been imported into the
Ubuntu repository for intrepid, but the version available for hardy is
completely broken (the last time I checked). Please, do update it or please
remove it from the distribution. It will have ill effects on people who
depends on it.

> > 2 - since I plan on packaging it so that it compiles on all arches
> >     available on Debian, I would like to ask if any of you would like to
> >     help me with this task in a cooperative way (I plan on creating a
> >     repository on Debian's Alioth service).
> 
> We do uploads of source code (actually: source packages) that are compiled on 
> a set of build-hosts without human intervention (and so does Debian).

I do know about that.

> It is not possible to "tweak" compilations on a particular machine and
> upload binary packages. Therefore, the package should be able to handle
> the different architectures automatically, and if something special needs
> to be set (compiler options or such) it should be take care of in
> debian/rules.

This is why I am asking for some helping hand on maintaining the package:
it currently consists of a huge patch taken from Gentoo, together with some
patches of mine, all applied to hfsprogs with the help of quilt.

The problem is the following: while my patches are designed to address just
one issue and are easily disabled, the patch from Gentoo is a monolithic
thing that changes things from trivial to quite essential things and this
prevents the upload of a newer upstream version of the tools.

> It is more difficult to handle different patches for different  platforms, and 
> although it can be done,  it is discouraged. The closest to being acceptable 
> is passing different arguments to ./configure, and of course your code can 
> rely on #ifdefs etc.

BTW, there is no "./configure" thing in this packaging of Apple's utilities.

> Putting your project on alioth is a good idea, and perhaps your best bets is 
> to collaborate with the Debian maintainers to get the package compile & 
> working. Then those packages will quickly show up in Ubuntu.

Perhaps I was misunderstood the first time and now my idea is clearer, but
I am interested in getting feedback from Ubuntu. The way you wrote the
sentences above give me (what I wouldn't like to believe) a bad impression of
the MOTUs regarding just getting the job done.

I hope that I am mistaken.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org