Thanks for the information, Josselin: On Jan 29, 2009, at 7:10 AM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
Le mercredi 28 janvier 2009 à 07:44 -0700, zooko a écrit :
3. It would be okay for this process to be automated (or semi- automated), but there's some flaw in the design of stdeb which means it will never be able to do it right unless stdeb is rewritten with a new design.
This is the one. BTW, I don’t consider this a flaw in stdeb, it’s just that stdeb was not designed with the goal to produce packages suitable for Debian itself.
What we need is the equivalent of dh_make_perl [0]. That is, a script that will generate the debian/ structure in a semi-automated fashion, leading to a package ready to be installed after minor tweaks and a human’s review. Bonus points would go for providing a script suggesting changes in the description and/or dependencies when updating the package for a new upstream release.
A-ha! I think I understand the disagreement now! It hinges on the subtle distinction between "manual", "automated", and "semi-automated". Unless I'm misunderstanding something (which is quite possible), stdeb already does exactly what you just suggested. It produces a debian/ subdirectory and a .dsc file, which you can them feed into "dpkg-buildpackage" to produce a .deb. You can, of course, inspect and modify those files after stdeb produced then and before dpkg- buildpackage consumes them. http://github.com/astraw/stdeb/tree/master Perhaps there is some confusion on this point because I like to *talk* about stdeb as though it sucks in Python source trees and spits out .deb's. That's how I like to use it -- I try not to look at or change the .dsc or debian/ files. However, there's no fundamental reason that I am aware of that it couldn't be used by a real Debian developer to ease his task of producing completely Policy- Compliant, high-quality Debian packages. Apparently the Perl and Haskell Debian developers have already started using semi-automation this way to maintain large numbers of Policy-Compliant Perl and Haskell .deb's produced from Perl and Haskell source trees. If you, or anyone, tries this, please post to this list and also Cc: me (the list is just too high-volume for me to keep up :-() and I'll try to help. Regards, Zooko --- Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem -- http://allmydata.org store your data: $10/month -- http://allmydata.com/?tracking=zsig