[pkg-php-pear] pkg-php-tool and pear-channels interactions (Was: Pear channels in a single package)

[Mathieu Parent]

2013/10/28 David Prévot <david at tilapin.org>:
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> Hi,
>
> Le 21/10/2013 10:18, Mathieu Parent a écrit :
>> 2013/10/20 David Prévot <david at tilapin.org>:
>
>> I'm not sure that this is a good idea to pull the pear channel
>> packages by default:
>> - Most of the PECL packages come from the pecl.php.net website.
>> - The channel list will change over time, and we'll get FTBFS between
>> distributions
>
> A versionned dependency on pear-channels could be needed in some
> (backported) package, but it would make it generally a bit easier to
> package PEAR packages if they all (usually) build-depend on the same set
> of packages by default (i.e debhelper and pkg-php-tools).
>
> I remember how hard it was to figure out that I needed a new channel the
> first time I packaged a new PEAR package, and hope this pear-channels
> package will ease a little bit the job. Not sure yet how to advertise
> that correctly in the existing pkg-php-tools documentation.

Yes. The error message could be better. But I don't kow how to catch
this. (patch welcome).

>>> that will also conveniently install a
>>> shared pkg-php-tools-overrides file.
>>
>> I think that all overrides should be installed from the pkg-php-tools
>> to avoid improper behavior.
>
> Having overrides available at the higher level sounds like a good idea,
> but I wonder how usual it is for packages from the official PEAR or PECL
> channels to depend on a package from a non-official PEAR channel. In
> other words, how many Debian package could benefit from an override
> provided by pkg-php-tools that would not already build-depend on
> pear-channels?
>
> Having the distinction between pkg-php-tools that just provide the tools
> to build packages, and pear-channels that provides the data does not
> seem totally worthless, but if you disagree, the current data from
> pear-channels [0] can easily be imported into the common pkg-php-tools
> override file.
>
> 0:
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-php/pear-channels.git;a=blob;f=debian/pkg-php-tools/pear-channels;hb=HEAD
>
> An other advantage I can see in handling overrides in pear-channels, is
> that they could usually be updated when adding a new channel, but they
> they can also be added in a single debian revision of this light
> non-native package (seems less scary to update and upload pear-channels
> than pkg-php-tools).
>
> Now that pear-channels made it into the archive, is it a good idea to
> update the pkg-php-tools documentation directly to point at
> pear-channels (and get rid of the channel.xml handling), or do you
> prefer a bug report about it?

OK. You can go ahead with:
- merging pear-channels in pkg-php-tools (but in another binary package)
- move overrides to pear-channels
- make pkg-php-tools depend on pear-channels

Regards
-- 
Mathieu