[debian-lan-devel] packaging Debian-LAN

[Andreas B. Mundt]

Hi all,

I just started preparing a package for Debian-LAN [1].  As I am still
far away from being an experienced packager, I would like to ask for
comments, critics and help how to best deploy the current state of
Debian-LAN in a package.  You can find the code in [2].

The package is pretty simple, as it just contains a FAI config space
that has to be dropped somewhere on the machine.  However, it's kind
of 'non-standard', as it's not an application but the condensed
information on how to role out with a few commands a complete local
area network running Debian.

As the FAI config space is pretty much specialized on Debian, I chose
the native package format.  Other distributions might be inspired by
the idea, but I think they need to create and maintain their own
config space and the idea of an 'upstream' config space makes not much
sense.

A couple of questions I encountered during the packaging and my
reasoning:

First, I dropped the config space to /usr/share/debian-lan-config/ .
However, lintian complained about an unknown interpreter
(#!/usr/sbin/cfagent) used in some files.  I can overwrite that
warning, but I thought perhaps it's better to drop it to
/usr/share/doc/debian-lan-config/ to kind of stress that these
executables are not to be run on the target machine.  So the
question is:  Where is the best place to drop the config space?

When using /usr/share/doc/debian-lan-config/, some files from the
config space got compressed by dh_compress.  I had to overwrite
dh_compress to prevent that.  Are there better ways?

I started with a dependency on fai-server, as fai-server is needed to
prepare the CD (cf. README.Debian or [3]).  However, this pulls in
packages I don't want and need, like isc-dhcp-server.  So I just
suggest fai-server now and the user can install it later without
recommends as explained in README.Debian.  Is there a way to depend or
recommend a package, but without pulling in associated
dependencies/recommends?

Finally, what is the best name for the package? I thought about
debian-lan-fai-config, but finally ended up without the fai.  I am
still not sure if FAI should be mentioned in the package name, or if
that gets too long.

That's it for now.  It would be nice to gain some feedback from a
review, and don't hesitate to point out bad style, etc.  Perhaps there
are even completely different and better ways on how to package
Debian-LAN.

I am looking forward to learn more.
Best regards,

     Andi




[1] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN
[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/debian-lan.git
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLAN/bootstrap