Re: Fw: [Xnee-devel] Packaging xnee for debian

[Jeremiah C. Foster]

> 
> > > libxnee
> > 
> > Both static (.a) and dyn (.so) lib?
> 
> The few programs I've written are usually pretty small if they're in
> C. I haven't really ever written anything big enough to have a library,
> or important enough to be distributed. I'm generally an administrator,
> not a developer. That being said, yeah... now that I think about it
> that doesn't make sense. I was initially thinking that the static libs
> would go with the headers, but that's stupid. Everything should be
> dynamic and there shouldn't be any static libs. So libxnee should have
> only .so, libxnee-dev should only have headers, xnee bins should be
> dynamically linked against libxnee. Yeah... so what I said was totally
> wrong.

I don't necessarily think you are wrong. What we need to do here is
clarify what debian prefers by reading the policy docs. Debian can be
pretty specific as to what they expect packages to contain and I
think following their policy makes for a good deb. A good deb is
likely to get into debian and Ubuntu which clearly is a goal of
packaging xnee.
   
> Perhaps, for the short term, it would make sense to just build one
> xnee package with everything, track down all the deps, then split
> everything out on the next package release.

This is the path we have followed. It generally works, but the
package is not buildable on other machines which stops us in our
tracks. I won't advise you against it, just set your expectations accordingly.

> Ross Burton suggested that
> by using uupdate we could probably have some kind of package fairly
> quickly.

Indeed. uupdate essetially just replaces the guts of a deb with new
source. So it works quite well with xnee. The resulting deb has not
worked however so although uupdate is an excellent tool, it does not
garauntee quality.
  
> Although I think it may be slightly more difficult than
> expected, I do think this might be the best initial approach.

I think this is a good approach, and you are right that this will be
difficult, Ross and I spent some time doing this and were somewhat
unseccessful although we did create a couple of debs. For some reason
they built here locally but he could not build them there. In any
case, I am hopeful that you will be successful and am certain hesa
and I will do what we can to make this happen. Xnee belongs in debian!

> I'm going
> to see what I can do to move forward on this while we continue to
> discuss the right way to distribute this package. The only reason I
> suggest doing this over just xnee-cli is that an xnee-cli package
> wouldn't be a real update for the xnee package currently in Debian, and
> even if that helps us it doesn't really help the community in the way
> we'd like to.
> 
> > ..... tomorrow....
> 
> Cool. 
> 

Jeremiah