Hey,
I've had some notes for questions to add for a while now, but I still
haven't gotten around to actually formulating questions out of them, so
I'm just going to post them here with the hopes that someone does the
work for me. :)
1. debhelper
I've found that some applicants don't really understand debhelper
very well. I'd like to add a question that asks what debhelper is,
what purposes it serves, what alternatives are available, and how to
use it properly (debian/compat, build-depends, ${misc:Depends},
basically the stuff covered in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/03/msg00002.html).
2. version control
I can't remember where I wanted to go with this one. I guess the
idea was that applicants should have a basic understanding of
cvs/subversion/arch, and maybe should understand the benefits of
maintaining packages with version control.
3. debconf, ucf
I think applicants should have an understanding of when to use
debconf in their packages, how to use it, and when ucf can be used in
conjunction with it.
4. debconf notes vs. debian/NEWS
Which to use...
5. testing migration
How packages migrate to testing, how to diagnose and fix migration
problems, and where to ask for help...
6. "pristine" tarballs
This one's pretty straight-forward. How to ensure a package's
orig.tar.gz is "pristine" (aka md5sums match), what to do if upstream
doesn't distribute a tar.gz (tar.bz2, etc.) ...
7. library packaging
I'd like to see some more questions about library packaging, since it
can be very tricky and many people, including existing developers,
make mistakes with it. In particular sonames, shlibs,
${shlibs:Depends}, dpkg-shlibdeps, and especially proper use of
dh_makeshlibs.
That last one reminds me--the question:
Why does a foo-dev package depends on foo?
Why is it fooX-dev and not foo-dev in some cases?
is confusing. Many applicants read that and say, "huh?" I think the
question is trying to ask why libraries are split into libblahX and
libblah-dev packages, and why it can be useful to have multiple -dev
versions for a library. Joerg, can you please clarify?
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