Re: FYI: QA uploads primer
Thanks for the feedback Sandro. I've written the primer for technical-minded
debian users that (a) want to contribute to debian, but are uncertain about
their long-term time-commitment; and (b) given their uncertain commitment,
won't read the whole policy, devref, and newmaint guide just for the sake of
trying out the water.
Of course anyone seriously interested in packaging should eventually read all
3 docs, but it helps if there's a shorter cheatsheet (with appropriate
pointers) to get started.
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 08:33:57AM +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote [edited]:
> 1. QA uploads are nothing different from a normal upload except for
> the Maintainer field; does it worth a full wiki page? A paragraph in
> some other QA page would be enough
Technically yes, but they are different in terms of expected time-commitment
from the person preparing the upload. For that reason alone, it's worth having
a guide for potential not-yet-committed contributors.
> 2. "read or skim through the table of contents of the Debian new
> maintainer's guide (so that you know where to lookup things you might
> need)" ??? policy and devref are just a waste of time? this is a wrong
> suggestion (without mentioning the other 2 docs).
The debian developer's guide is mentioned two bullets below the one you cite.
I've added after that:
* eventually you must also become familiar with the debian policy (but for
now you might get away with using lintian, described below)
Bear in mind that the point of the primer is to get people started asap,
instead of discourage them by saying ``we don't want to even hear from you
until you finish these 3 long docs''
And frankly, I think that lintian does a very good job at catching most policy
violations, so until one gets serious enough about packaging to actually read
the whole policy, we should at least make sure that they use lintian.
> 3. "an orphaned package has its Maintainer set to Debian QA Group
> <packages@qa.debian.org>" what for those that are orphaned but never
> received a QA upload? qa.debian.org/orphaned.html to have such list
adapted phrasing and added the above url at the next bullet
> 4. "it's NOT okay to edit any upstream file; for that, you'll have to
> use a patch management system (such as quilt [2])" too strong
> requirement IMO. if an orphaned package already does direct upstream
> code changes, might be ok to keep doing them in the qa upload.
I've made the statement milder (added "typically"), feel free to edit more
yourself
> 5. "the first entry in debian changelog should be QA upload" dch does
> the right thing without specify anythinh (just update maintainer field
> first to QA if it's not yet)
fixed
> 6. "if the package is team-maintained (see the Maintainer field in
> debian/control, you might have to commit your changes to the team's
> repository; but this shouldn't be the case because we said that you'd
> work on an orphaned package )" so why mention it?? this is wrong. It's
> orphaned, no need to commit anythin to the ex-team.
removed
> 7. "repeat steps 3-4" there are no numbers in your doc.
fixed
> 8. "check that your newly-built .deb installs, uninstalls, and
> re-installs without problems (you did choose a non-critical package,
> so this should be okay even if your package is horribly broken)"
> what??
never mind, removed the stuff in parens
> 9. "if you have modified the package's dependencies, use pbuilder to
> confirm that the package builds successfully" USE PBUILDER IN ANY CASE
> BEFORE UPLOAD TO MENTORS!!!
fixed
btw I've added a link to the QA wiki from DebianDevelopment (it seemed
completely isolated from the rest of the wiki)
Cheers,
Serafeim
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