[Xapian-discuss] Debian Package Installation

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 06:33:13PM +0100, R. Mattes wrote:
> As in "packaging for Debian proper" or as in "has some experience with 
> building Debian packages". I'd fall into the later category and would
> happly help keeping the debs up to date (i've to do that anyway since we
> use them on our servers).

It's more the former.  You don't need to actually be a debian developer
(since I have one willing to sponsor uploads) but the packages need to
conform to Debian policy, and packaging libraries is more involved than
packaging applications.  That said, Richard's packages are in pretty
good shape I believe, so I doubt there's much work to do on that front
but you'd need to be reasonably familiar with debian's policy documents
(or be willing to read them!)

For example, I think debian require man pages for all binaries, and we
don't currently have any.  But you could use GNU "help2man" to generate
some from --help output, and add --help output to any programs which
don't currently support it.

Perhaps we should start a "help wanted" page on the wiki.  There are
several tasks like this which require specialist skills in a particular
area but don't require deep knowledge of Xapian itself.  Working on
bindings for other languages is another.  Also, adding visibility
annotations to the library.

Cheers,
    Olly