[Xapian-devel] Debian stuff

[Richard Boulton]

After fiddling with the debian packages for a while, I've come to the 
conclusion that it's not actually terribly appropriate to keep the 
packages for each xapian module inside the respective module in CVS.

This is for a couple of reasons:

1) In general, the Debian packages may have multiple releases for a 
single xapian release.  This could be due to finding minor packaging 
errors, or due to events entirely of of Xapian's scope (eg, changes in 
Debian packaging policy).

2) It is better to build the Debian packages from release tarballs, 
possibly with a few patches, than directly from the CVS tree.  Issues 
such as building the documentation become easier if we just use the 
documentation as distributed.  For example I'll not have to build-depend 
on "halibut" if the distribution tarballs contain the generated halibut 
files.

For this reason, I propose creating a new, top-level, directory in CVS, 
called "xapian-debian", and moving the Debian control files into there 
(together with a script I'm using to grab the distribution tarballs and 
build the packages).  Or possibly the name should just be "debian".


I'd like at least one of Olly and James to explicitly approve this 
before I go ahead, since it involves making a new top level directory.

I should shortly be able to make some Debian packages, suitable for use 
with Debian stable, available in an apt-get repository.  Packages for 
unstable/testing will have to wait until I have a machine with unstable 
on it to build on, and a decent connection speed.

-- 
Richard