Packaging Questions, New Debian Package, Packagers Guide

Scott Ritchie scott at open-vote.org
Tue Nov 23 04:32:08 CST 2004


The Debian packages have gotten rather out of date, and it looks like
Ove's not going to be making them any more.  I took the initiative and
decided to try making one myself.  I'm polishing off a new Debian
package now.

Some major things I noticed:

1) There were a lot of old hacks in the package that are probably no
longer necessary, due to advancements in wine like wineprefixcreate and
such.  There was also the remenants of a very old problem with compiling
using flex (which I remember experiencing the old days) in the form of a
special exception for installing newer flex packages.

2) Very old packages like winesetuptk should now be officially obsoleted
by making them conflicted and replaced.  I also did the same to the
libwine-* packages that weren't doing anything but making documentation
folders, like libwine-alsa.

3) Making my package looks to be a lot simpler than what's implied in
the (now year out of date) package makers guide.  I found that
documentation quite useless (and didn't even find it until I was about
half way done anyway).  Again, this is probably due to advancements in
wine itself.

4)  What I didn't find is a standard list of packages that aren't
strictly required for wine (like libxt-dev and flex), but that wine can
benefit from.  A good example would be the alsa development files.
These are all things that should be included in the build dependencies
for the package.

So far, my list of build dependant packages is the following:
flex, bison, libx11-dev, libasound2-dev, libxt-dev, libicu28-dev

However, I'm not sure if this means the wine binary package should
depend on them, since it's compiled in.  So, should I make libicu28 a
dependancy for wine?


Now, this leads to the question: is it worth even having a package
maintainers guide?  If so, who wants to update it?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie




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