Questions about packaging nautilussvn (adapting upstream debianisation, restarting nautilus)

[Jason Heeris <jason.heeris@gmail.com>]

Hi there,

I recently decided to take on the packaging of an SVN extension for
Nautilus, available at:

http://code.google.com/p/nautilussvn/

ITP: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469181 (I did
discuss it with Josselin Mouette in between the RFP -> ITP)

The upstream authors have already packaged it unofficially for Ubuntu.
They haven't put the packaging info directly in a top level debian dir
but under a packages/ubuntu/... dir. Realistically I've just had to
check their packaging for conformance to Debian requirements, and do
plenty of reading, building, testing, reading and then some more
testing.

I have read the New Maintainers Guide (and the docs on policy,
packaging, etc) and the Debian Mentors' FAQ (including the parts on
upstream debianisation and the perils thereof) and the contents of
various other packages, but I still have a few questions.

1. In the upstream packaging they have a changelog in the Debian
format, and I am trying to figure out if I should ignore this and
start one from scratch, or simply add my entries to the top for the
Debian package, or change their release lines to mine, or... something
else?

2. The upstream tarball is 'nautilus_0.12-beta1-2.tar.gz', and the
changelog version in their packaging is '0.12-1ubuntu1'. I changed
this to '0.12.beta1.2', but now I realise that it will be detected as
an NMU (at least, lintian thinks it is). Is there a 'proper' way to
denote this? Will this actually be a problem, or will it just cause
annoying lintian warnings?

3. The installation of the package requires updating the GTK icon
cache and restarting nautilus. The upstream authors included some
postinst instructions to update the icon cache and to tell
update-notifier to restart nautilus (I don't use update-notifier
myself though). Is there a "standard" procedure for nautilus extension
packages? (I realise that there aren't actually that many in Debian,
but still, it'd be good to know...)

Thanks for your help,

Jason Heeris