[Pkg-crosswire-devel] Why are there quilt packages in pkgcrosswire PPA?

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

2009/8/31 Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm>:
> Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
>
>> I can certainly modify packaging and keep two version: one for
>> Karmic+Squeeze and one for older Ubuntu versions. It seems it is a
>> matter of taste cause one of my python packages was not sponsored
>> because it was not using latest "dh stuff".
>
> That's annoying to have do to, though.  I don't see why packages can or
> should be rejected for not using one particular set of packaging tools;
> Debian policy does not mandate or require using "the latest dh stuff".
> Maybe the Python folks have a specific policy about that, which Debian
> as a whole does not?
>

I guess my sponsor wanted to mentor me about the latest developement
of debhelper. And from that process I did learn were to find the
latest tips & tricks....

> My viewpoint was that somehow, we the pkgcrosswire team are now
> responsible for maintaining extra packages that are not really
> Crosswire-related code at all, and long term, that is not something we
> should take on lightly or without discussion.
>

IMHO ppa is extra kindness to upstream and users =) I did spend a few
hours with Mathew to get optional library linking right for Hardy &
Intrepid. I'm more of opinion "compiles in older release - Great;
doesn't - well old is not supported".

But I do see your point since we started to provide crosswire software
we should not provide support for extra random backports.

> But if the only alternative is maintaining two versions of the Crosswire
> pacages, that is extra long term work too.  Surely there should be a way
> to avoid that.
>

Well at that point i had an option to figure out where the problem was
coming from modify packaging test it in 5 pbuilds and see if it works.

Or to upload a "backport" of utility of the same upstream version as
all releases but with +1 debian revision which adds 1 extra file -
addon for dh.

I went for the latter because it was time wise quicker.

> Now I'm not sure which way forward is better!
>

Well for starters I have no intension to provide lenny-backports for
starters because it doesn't have KDE 4 nor recent enough GNOME....

For future I hope there will be no more issues like these =) eg.
Karmic and up users will use ubuntu repositories
Hardy & Intrepid will not be updated once we get build failures which
require unreasonable amount of effort (eg more that one-off fix)
And then ppa will be used only for people who want bleeding edge releases.

> Jonathan
>

-- 
With best regards


Dmitrijs Ledkovs (for short Dima),
Ледков Дмитрий Юрьевич