Mail from the Ubuntu mame MOTU

[Emmanuel Kasper]

Hello
I got this email today from Cesare.
Manu

Hello Manu,

I tried to write to the list at Google groups, but I couldn't see my
message back.
So I wrote to the Mame Debian package list too, and the mailer kicked
back the message
(please see the attached message).

Any idea about what's happening? :(
Yes, I did subscribe my address of course... ;)


Hello all,

I wrote earlier in Google groups, but it seems my message
got lost. :(

So once again, I'm introducing myself as the maintainer of
Mame in Ubuntu, I've been working on it for 4 years now.

My aim is to merge the Ubuntu package with the Debian one,
and as Manu outlined there are a number of things that need
some pondering to choose at best.

I'm currently working on packaging Mess, this is what I've
done so far:

* mame has been split in two binary packages, the first
   depending on the latter:
   * mame, the emulator itself (including manpage)
   * mame-common, configuration files (should help
       packaging derivatives as Wolfmame)

* mess takes advantage of the multi-tarball feature of
   debsrc 3.0, as it is distributed as an incremental
   tarball against Mame source

As per the splitting, I know it is questionable and I'm
willing to revert to a single binary, whilst I'd stick with
the multi-tarball against building the tarball via SVN as I
consider it more solid. I think we should consider SVN for
backporting fixes only.

The package for mess has not been published yet:
* it lacks docs and detailed copyright infos
* mess-tools shares chdman with mame-tools, I'm stuck between
   *   making mess-tools depend on mame-tool
   *   turning both to meta packages and breaking them in a
       set of packages (mame-chdman, mame-ldplayer,
       mess-whatever...) which the meta packages will then
       depend on (recommended IMHO)

Phew! That's all for now! Any observation is welcome. :)

I hope we can help each other to improve Mame both for
Debian and Ubuntu, and learn from each other as well.

Cesare.