Packaging Questions, New Debian Package, Packagers Guide

[Vincent Béron]

Le mar 23/11/2004 à 05:32, Scott Ritchie a écrit :
> The Debian packages have gotten rather out of date, and it looks like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.

Are you (or plan to be) a Debian developer (so your packages would
replace Ove's in Debian system), or do you simply plan to provide those
as a 3rd party?

> 
> 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.

libwine-alsa packaged winealsa.dll.so the last time I checked.

> 
> 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 the (now year out of date) package makers guide.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.

Wine as a whole is aiming to be self setupping, so less and less is
required when building packages (other than providing a "good" build
environment).

> 
> 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.

As you found out already, check include/config.h for undefined vars. A
lot are only there for compatibility between different core system files
across Unix distributions, but you should be able to spot the ones
depending on interesting libs.

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

I'm not sure you should put them as build dependancies. Wine can work
without them. Sure, for you (when building the "official" ones) it's a
good idea to have them installed on your system, but 

Vincent