Re: making debian packages
> On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, joost witteveen wrote:
>
> > [Charset iso-8859-2 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> > > I've made my own deb file with polonisation stuff for tetex. I know that
> > > other people may want to use it so i think about putting it in contrib
> > > directory.
> >
> > Why in the contrib directory? Why don't you want to become a maintainer?
> >
> > Only if you don't want to maintain (correct bugs found) the package
> > afterwards, it should be put in non free (there are other cases, but
> > I don't think they apply here). Generally, Debian isn't too keen
> > on "non-maintained" packages, as they will probably have to be removed
> > in the future (when we use different libs etc), and will only result
> > in user-irritation in the long run.
> >
> > How to become a maintainer: see
> >
>
> First of all I WANT to maintain my package. But I don't have so much time
> to do all the things described in debian-policy.
Are you sure you don't have enough time? You describe you've got
beta testers trying you package (and apparently you fix the bugs they
report), you are asking us on debian-user, so it seems to me you're
an excelent candidate for a new debian package maintainer (only
if you already know now that in one year time, you are never
going to speak polish, or use debian any more, then you'd be a worce
candidate, but that doesn't seem to be the case eigther)
> I've made this package and I want to share my work with others.
Note, btw, that those others probably isn't restricted to polish
Debian users: how about russian ones, that want to learn from how
you did things? And, come to russian, even I would install tegex-ru
(if it ever is released), as my brother lives in Moscow now and it
might be fun to write something in russian to him. So, by making
the package a "true" debian package, there may be many more people
that indirectly benifit form your work than you realise.
> Second of all my package is not so typical becouse it's
> made rather as a bunch of other packages which can be found on the Net
> then my own work.
I maintain about 10 different packages. Only one or two is "my own work",
the others are stuff found on the net. True, for example my gs package
is mostly one package found on the net, but by collecting many different
files around the internet, and putting them in the right locations so
that polish people can write poslish "out of the box", you are just
making your package more valuable than just my gs package: If there were
no gs package, people could easily download it themselves, and run it.
Your package, however, saves many people a much more work.
> Becouse in tetex-pl (so it's called by me) there are 3 packages with
> non-GPL licencies and the main difference is that authors want to
> distribute the whole package with sources and not only separate files from
> it I had to put whole packages in tetex-pl. Now I know that it can by
> freely distributed (in sesn of GPL). But in fact there is no
> tetex-pl-source package at all (all sources and original docs are in
> tetex-pl) so as I understand I cannot put it in main distribution. It can
> be freely distributed so not in non-free. So I think myself that it should
> be in contrib directory.
I am not sure I fully understand this:
What I understand is:
you downloaded package1, package2, and package3. You put the stuff
in
.../tetex-pl-0.1/package*
on your harddisk, you created the files
.../tetex-pl-0.1/debian/*
to make the three packages combine to one debian package. Now, doing
dpkg-buildpackage
in the .../tetex-pl-0.1 directory should create the "debian source" package
(tetex-pl_0.1-1.orig.tar.gz) [see footnote 1], the diffs,
and the debian package (tetex-pl_0.1-1_i386.deb) etc.
Also, package1 (or whatever) contains files that have to be kept
together when distributed. But that's actualy what happens, as
every Debian CD has got to have the source-code on it (to
satisfy GPL (at least an old version of it)). So, I don't think
distributing tetex-pl_0.1.orig.tar.gz would make the authors
unhappy.
So, if the above is correct, then you've got the source package already.
As everything can be distributed with diffs (you didn't mention this,
but I hope this is the case), it seems to me the stuff _can_ in fackt
go in the main distribution. (if not, maybe you can ask the upstream
authors of the package*, they probably didn't intend you to be unable
to put their stuff in debian).
[footnote 1]: maybe your problem is the .diff file, as that doesn't get
created automatically. To do that, just (re-)untar package* in
.../tetex-pl_0.1.orig/package*
and run dpkg-buildpackage. Now the diffs aren't really against "the"
upstream package, but against all upstream pacakges, but this should
be OK. (just put a note in /usr/doc/tetex-pl/copyright on how you
created the orig package.)
> So now you have much more information and I wait for good advise for me.
> Naturally thanks all of you for making such great product as Debian
Apparently the main problem here is copyrights. That is always a _big_
problem, and you're doing a good job in asking about this as soon
as possible.
> and thanks to Joost Witteveen for this message.
Thanks. Actually, one of my email responces (not to debian-user, btw)
was selected as a "example of a bad (rude) maintainer" by someone
recently. So, I guess I just have good moods and bad moods (actually,
when I woke up this morning I thought I was in a bad mood, but guess
I'm wrong).
--
joost witteveen, joostje@debian.org
#!/usr/bin/perl -sp0777i<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((..)*)$/)
#what's this? see http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/
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