[3dprinter-general] 3D-printer packaging

[Bas Wijnen]

Greetings everyone,

We just got a new request from Elena to join.  Welcome to the team. :-)

When I started the Alioth project, the server was having some trouble
and I was unable to properly set everything up.  Then I got distracted,
but I'm getting back to it now.  I would like to have a discussion on
how we want to organize our work.

To record the state of this discussion, I started
https://wiki.debian.org/3D-printer
Please edit it with anything that should be there.

But first things first:
I made Nicholas and Zlatan project admins, but they are not on this
mailing list (I added both of you to bcc for this mail).  Please
subscribe on [1] so you can follow the rest of this and future
discussions.

Second, Nicholas is on the project twice (once as dd, once as guest).
Can you remove your own guest user from there?

So about the packaging.  On the wiki I added an initial list of packages
which we should maintain.  Some of them are already packaged; some by
me, some by others.  If you know of other packages, please add them to
the list.  Once we have our git repository organized, we should split
this list in "things we maintain" (with links) and "things we should
maintain".

Oh, by the way, I received a mail (too long ago) from the python-power
maintainer that he wants to drop the package.  We should take it over.
It's probably an easy package, so anyone who wants to get their hands
dirty, please go ahead.  If you need a sponsor, just ask on the list and
I (or someone else?) will help.

Also, if you feel like picking up a package, but it has an ITP by any
team member, please ping the list to ask if you can go ahead and package
it.  I'm sure the answer will be yes. :-)

Also, when filing new ITPs, please mention that it'll be maintained by
the team.  Then team members know for sure that it's fine if they pick
it up.

As for the maintainer and uploader fields in the packages:
The Maintainer field should be set to this list:
3-D printer team <3dprinter-general at lists.alioth.debian.org>
Policy says:
> if the Maintainer control field names a group of people and a shared
> email address, the Uploaders field must be present and must contain at
> least one human with their personal email address.

This is obviously the case for us.  So when to add yourself to the
Uploaders field of a package?  If you intend to care for it.  If you're
just doing an upload to fix a bug and don't want to worry about the
package any further, just mark it as a Team Upload in the changelog
instead.

So far these are just formalities.  Now on to the first point of actual
discussion.

How do we organize our repository?  I have limited experience with
git-buildpackage, and I don't like it.  It's too hard to set up, and
that scares potential contributers away.  So either we write a very
short and simple list of instructions on the wiki, or we don't use it.
Did I mention you should say so if you disagree with me? ;-)

My suggestion for the repository is to use a directory for each package,
which has the name of that package, including the upstream version (so
it's ready to be used as a build directory).  In there, there is a
debian/ directory which contains all our work.  We use source/format 3.0
(quilt) for all packages.

To build a package, you'll need to get the tarball, either the new
upstream version, or the orig.gz from the Debian archive.  It should be
unpacked into the target directory and you're ready to run debuild.

When packaging a new upstream version, the tree should be moved to the
new version number.  If the old version need to stay around for updates
to stable or whatever reason, it can be copied instead.

How does that sound?

Then I have another point of discussion, but I'll start a new thread for
that.

I think that's all for now.  I hope you all feel like getting this thing
going, because the packages can certainly use some attention.

[1] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/3dprinter-general

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