[Xapian-devel] Debian stuff

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 12:50:22PM +0100, Richard Boulton wrote:
> 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.

As you say, it's not a perfect fit.  But I think on balance it's not
worth changing for the moment.

> 1) In general, the Debian packages may have multiple releases for a 
> single xapian release.

True, though moving the debian packaging info away from the sources
really doesn't address the key point - that you want to link a version
of the packaging with a version of the source code.  And you can easily
do that - to produce "debian_0-8-0-2" just copy the "debian_0-8-0-2" tag
for the sources (cvs co them at the tag), but create a fresh tag at the
latest version for the debian subdirectory.  This doesn't need a true
branch, since the "upstream source" part is the same.

> 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).

The above addresses this, but it's not usually expected that you
repackage just to addresses updated policy unless you're updating
anyway (a package states which version of policy it implements).
And debian policy doesn't directly apply to us until we're in debian
anyway.

> 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.

True, but you can just "make dist" first, then unpack the new tarball
and package from that.

Keeping the debian packaging info in each project has benefits too -
it's more likely to be updated when anything relevant changes (e.g.
library versioning, adding/removing files which the packaging needs
to know about).

> 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.

I can probably build unstable packages, though disk space is a bit
limiting right now.

Cheers,
    Olly