new maintainer questions
Hi there,
being a long time Debian (and derivatives) user, I am thinking about
starting to package for Debian. First, I'd like to try my luck on
phpMyID, a very simple single-user OpenID identity provider. This isn't
available as a Debian package yet, and there is no intent that I am
aware of.
I have read through the guides and FAQs available for new maintainers,
but there are some questions I could not answer:
1) Is is actually needed to do the packaging work on a Debian system, or
would a derivative like Ubuntu also do? I would always test my package
on a "real" Debian before putting it up for sponsoring or uploading, but
having to do actual development on Debian would mean a parallel
installation of a Debian Desktop. Those of you packaging for both Debian
and Ubuntu, do you switch systems all the time?
2) phpMyID is implemented in PHP, which is not the language I am most
familiar with - but it should be easy to learn. My primary language is
Java, but I couldn't find any simple Java packages to start with that I
actually miss. How important is the implementation language for package
maintainers? Should I still try for my first package?
3) The guides suggest to start with adopting an existing package rather
than creating a new one. A package that I could imaging adopting would
be "jabber" (jabberd, an XMPP server), simply because there is a new
upstream version for quite some time now that I'd really like to have
packaged. However, I feel that jabberd is a project way too big for my
first package, even if I could base my work on an existing package.
phpMyId is only 1800 lines of code. How would you decide?
Best regards,
Andreas
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