RFS: nvidia-cg-toolkit (updated package)

[Andreas Beckmann]

[Adding Cc: Federico Di Gregorio as he is the current maintainer]

On 2011-05-03 05:32, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Michael Tautschnig <mt at debian.org> writes:
> 
>> Hi Miguel,
> 
>>> I am looking for a sponsor for the new version 3.0.0015-0.1
>>> of my package "nvidia-cg-toolkit".
>>>
>> [...]
> 
>> You seem to be putting lots of energy in this package. Yet your changes
>> go far beyond what an ordinary NMU should be like. As there has been a
>> sequence of NMUs already probably it would be best if you took over the
>> package. Yet you will have to follow proper procedures to do so. Have
>> you gotten in touch with the current official maintainer(s)? Looking at
>> your changelog you seem to have spoken to at least one of them. Please
>> provide some information about this process (here, not in the package)
>> and please perform the proper procedure to take over the package, if you
>> intend to do so in long term. If all you want to do is an NMU, then
>> please make sure you keep the changes to a minimum.
> 
> Also, if you're interested in maintaining packages of this sort in
> general, you may want to consider joining the NVIDIA packaging team by
> subscribing to the pkg-nvidia-devel mailing list on
> lists.alioth.debian.org.  We're currently maintaining the CUDA packages as
> well as the NVIDIA graphics drivers and libraries, and while I don't have
> any time to work on NVIDIA packaging myself, I'm happy to do uploads for
> others and some package review.  Other people on the team may also be
> willing to help.

I'm fine with getting this package under the Debian NVIDIA Maintainers
umbrella. But of course we need to hear what Federico plans, first.
I can help with the packaging, but I doubt I'll ever use the package :)

I just had a brief look over the package.
What's curious is that you need a login at nvidia to download the
software, but the license explicitely allows redistribution.

* as Andres Mejia has resigned, you should also drop the
    DM-Upload-Allowed: yes
  from debian/control as there are no non-DD uploaders left
* the debian/watch file can be generated with a single sed call with
  two -e '...' -e '...' parameters
* the watch file is not useful since it points to a page that requires
  a login :-(
* why do we need override_dh_gencontrol: and override_dh_builddeb:? dh
should work fine without
* the doc package should only Recommends/Suggests: the toolkit (if you
add a dependency at all), otherwise you have an Arch: all package that's
uninstallable everywhere except on i386/amd64. But why shouldn't you
read the docs on a different arch or without installing the toolkit?
* use Suggests: nvidia-cg-toolkit-doc (= ${source:Version}) as this is
an arch:all package that does not get binNMUed. See deb-substvars(5)
* the runtime libraries should probably be split to a separate package,
I assume that binaries created with the cg toolkit will be linked
against them and this shouldn't pull in the toolkit. But that's not for
this new upstream NMU. A single package for both libs should be OK to
avoid mixing different versions as there seems to be no proper
SONAME/SOVERSION being used :-(
* why do we need post{inst,rm} scripts that manually call ldconfig?
* eventually override the Informational and eXperimental lintian tags,
too (spelling-error-in-binary, binary-has-unneeded-section,
shlib-calls-exit). Have a look at the nvidia-graphics-drivers package
how we did this there, e.g. copy the comments why we added these overrides
* since source code seems to be available, can you rebuild the cgfxcat
and cginfo binaries? These rebuilds could be stripped :-)
* debhelper 8, standards 3.9.2

Andreas