I am trying to package the Swiss Ephemeris in a way that will allow it to be included in all the various distros. Actually I hope to package all the free software astrology programs for the various distros. They all depend on the Swiss Ephemeris, so it must be first. It is unfortunate that the first package must be a library as I understand that libraries are the most difficult. The Swiss Ephemeris has been extensively used mostly in a WINDOWS environment and the upstream source is mostly concerned about that environment. Source tarballs are non-standard from a packaging standpoint. I plan to use the upstream's .h and .c files. I plan to replace the make system with autotools infrastructure and add packaging information for both debian and rpm based distros. I plan to get everything building on OBS, and then after some testing, get some people to help me get into the various distros. I do not want to modify the source, that is the .c and .h unless absolutely necessary to make things work. I am not an astrology programmer. Existing Linux programs, that link to the Swiss Ephemeris copy the source create a static library libswe.a and link to that. Existing source tarballs are named like this. swe_unix_src_1.67.00.tar.gz swe_unix_src_1.75.00.tar.gz swe_unix_src_1.76.00.tar.gz swe_unix_src_1.77.00.tar.gz The library has an entry point, swe_version that returns strings like this: 1.77.00 I have a note from the author saying > No API is changed, i.e. old applications work find against newer > libraries. I don't know if this has ever been tested in a Linux or UNIX environment as everyone has been linking staticly. I have read the section in Debian Library Packaging guide on package naming and what files go in what package. I have also read the GNU libtool manual on package versioning. But I am not sure I have understood it all. My questions are: 1) How should my source packages be named? Is swe_unix_src_1.77.00 OK? 2) How should by library package be named? I am sure it should start with libswe, but then I am not so sure. 3)How should my library -dev package be named? 4)what should my SONAME be? I am not sure how the versioning system used for packaging and libtools should interact with my upstream's versioning system which he has a lot invested in. 5)Should the library and its include files be in a subdirectory? I do not think people want include files from the Swiss Ephemeris in /usr/include Thank you for helping me. Many people currently spend a lot of money on proprietary astrology programs runing under proprietary OS. I feel that long term, free software astrology has great potential, because of its superior development model. sharing is better than hoarding. -- Paul Elliott 1(512)837-1096 pelliott@BlackPatchPanel.com PMB 181, 11900 Metric Blvd Suite J http://www.free.blackpatchpanel.com/pme/ Austin TX 78758-3117
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