On Sun, 6 Nov 2011, Joey Parrish wrote:
Jaldhar,
I haven't heard back in a while. Anything wrong with my package or repo
that's holding up an upload?
1. I think I mentioned this before; we should concentrate on 4.5. I don't see any purpose in having multiple versions of the flex sdk in Debian do you?
No, but my last company used Flex quite a lot, and every new version seemed to introduce incompatibilities. Software written for 4.1 won't necessarily work without modification on 4.5. So I thought it would make sense to be prepared to provide multiple versions if/when the need arises. For now, I would release the 4.5 package and wait to see if any packages that build-depend on flex-sdk fail to build with 4.5, in which case they can instead build-depend on a specific version that we will have ready in advance. It's also possible that after 4.5, Adobe will release 4.6 or 5.0, in which case I didn't want to be locked into the package name flex-sdk now, just to have to split into 4.5 and 5.0 packages later. So multiple versions is mainly about avoid the assumption that 4.5 is good for everybody, either now or in the future. If backward compatibility were maintained by Adobe, this would be a non-issue, of course.
2. Debian has a utility called git-buildpackage which is a wrapper around dpkg-buildpackage and, as the name suggests, allows building a .deb directly from a git repository. It is not required but it would be nice if flex-sdk could work with it. In order to do so, the debianized source needs to be in the master branch and the upstream source in a branch called upstream. (Actually you can change these but those are the defaults.) Another called pristine-tar allows keeping the upstream tarball within the git repository. I'll go ahead and set this up for you if you like.
Yes, please. I could definitely use help, and I can learn more about debian from your mods.
3. Rather than lug around all the bits of the upstream source which will never be used in Debian such as .exe and .a files, they should be removed from the .orig.tar.gz (And eventually all other non DFSG-compliant bit too but that will be a work in progress.) Ordinarily we like to keep it as close to what upstream is shipping as possible but this is one of the exceptions to that rule. These changes should be documented in a file called debian/README.source and I suppose in the get-orig-source target of debian/rules.
I don't have the code in front of me right now, but I believe I removed all the .exe and .bat files in debian/rules. I understand why you'd remove them in the .tar.gz, but I thought that for simplicity's sake, removing everything from the .tar.gz would wait until we were building from source. Adobe keeps those in their svn repo, unfortunately. The .a files may be necessary, because the SDK is able to produce AIR binaries for mobile devices. Ideally, those would also be built from source, but in the mean time, they should not be deleted from the package, IMO.
Thanks,
--Joey