On 2009-09-14 21:57 +0200, Sebastian Harl wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 09:19:00PM +0200, Sven Joachim wrote:
>>
>> During the past two weeks, I have been studying the package, triaged
>> some of the bugs and made several changes. See the Debian changelog and
>> the commit logs for what I've broke.
>
> Cool! Looks like you've put quite some work into that. Thanks!
It's actually not quite as much as it may seem at first glance, most of
the changes are small and mainly help to decruftify the package. Like
most of the old packages in Debian, it has accumulated some patina over
the years.
>> There are some other things that could/should be done, but for which I
>> would like other people's opinion/help:
>>
>> - Switch to quilt from dpatch? While I strongly prefer quilt, I've seen
>> that you use dpatch for your packages, so I held back changing the
>> patch system.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion on that. We use quilt for rrdtool as well,
> so go ahead with that if that's your preference.
Done.
>> - Give the Debian patches meaningful headers. Finding out where the
>> patches came from and whether they are still necessary probably
>> requires digging deep into ncurses' history.
>
> That sounds like a very good idea but I expect that to be quite some
> work. I don't think this has to be finished before doing the next upload
> but should rather be improved as time permits.
Yes, I agree. Actually that holds for most of the proposed changes,
there is nothing that would be really urgent IMO.
>> - Move ncurses5-config to libncurses5-dev (and ncurses5w-config to
>> libncurses5w-dev) to fix #480437? I hesitate to remove files from an
>> essential package, although that change is unlikely to break anything.
>
> Hrm … I fully agree that *-config belong into the respective -dev
> packages but I also agree that removing some binary from an essential
> package might be dangerous. Maybe we should put that on debian-devel?
Would be an idea. It also depends on when the Squeeze freeze happens,
if that turns out to be soon it would be safer to delay the change until
the release.
>> - Reintroduce some of the /usr/share/doc symlinks where policy allows
>> this. The Ubuntu approach of deleting the upstream changelog from
>> some binary packages is not to my liking.
>
> I'm not in favor of removing upstream changelogs either. We could use a
> symlink for that, though, since it's rather big.
I was more thinking of full /usr/share/doc -> bar symlinks, where foo
depends on the exact version of bar. But that does not help for the
four most important packages ncurses-b{in,ase}, libncurses{,w}-5 that
are installed everywhere -- none of these has an exact dependency on
another.
>> Should I try to register an Alioth project for ncurses? The name
>> pkg-ncurses seems to be good for it, and we could use git as SCM and
>> move my personal repository to the project.
>
> That was my idea as well. I hope, I'll find some time to work on the
> package next week, once my diploma thesis is done.
Good luck with that!
Cheers,
Sven
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