Re: [DotGNU]Re: Debian packages

[Russell Stuart]

On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 19:41, Andrew Mitchell wrote:
> If you wish - what .spec files are there to fix, and Makefiles?
> I've been intending to do an overhaul of the pnet & co packaging at some
> point, preferably using cdbs to simplify matters. Perhaps we could work 
> together with that.

I am more than happy for you to continue to do the Debian
packages.  It means less work for me.  I have no doubt you 
will do just a good a job as I would have.

However, the amount of time it took you to get the packages
up on Debian did effect my attitude.  I use those packages
commercially, and it makes life a lot easier if they are
up to date.  If I could be sure they were never going to be
more than a few weeks out of date, then I would abandon the
work I have done.  But right now I am not so sure, and so
discarding that weeks work doesn't seem like a good idea.
If, when we get the end of Sarge's life, the Debian PNet
packages are still in good shape I am sure mine will of
disappeared.

With respect the changes to the make files: the make files
were changed primarily to fix lintian whinges.  The one
I remember off the top of my head is making the symbolic
link from cli-unknown-ar -> ar relative.  Its a good
policy to do that on all systems, so I changed the PNet
Makefile file rather than debian/rules.

With regards to the .spec files: I was the last person to
do major changes on them, and that makes me feel some
responsibility towards them.  I made those changes for the
same reason I did the Debian packages: before Debian I ran
RedHat, and keeping all software packaged makes maintaining
a lot of boxes much easier.  The original .spec files didn't
work, so I made them work.  The approach I took for the Debian
packages is a little unusual.  Given that .spec file already
had all the information needed to packages PNet I wrote a
shell script that translated the .spec file in Debian control
files.  The primary advantage of this was that I now only had
one set of package names, descriptions, file lists,
permissions, and so on to maintain - those in the .spec file.
It also means the .rpm and .deb packages were identical, as
in contained identical things, and had identical descriptions.
In the course of doing this lintian found a number of errors,
some of which were errors in the .spec file that I fixed.

Anyway, thanks for giving your permission.  I have committed
my changed to CVS.