[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] dbus-broker Debian packaging

[Daniele Nicolodi]

Hi David,

On 04/03/2018 05:08, David Herrmann wrote:
> *) The dbus-broker project uses submodules to link some code
> statically. The easiest way to build dbus-broker is using our .tar.xz
> tarballs provided with each release [1]. These include *all* source
> files, including the right submodule versions. If you want to build
> from -git directly, though, I recommend the strategy used by the
> arch-linux -git package [2]. They check out all required repositories
> and then use git to check out the correct revisions. This is
> definitely more flexible than the tarball based approach, but also
> needs slightly more maintenance, as you need to stay up-to-date with
> the submodules.

Debian tooling handles the submodules fine, I just compared the released
tarball for v11 with the one generated by the Debian tooling from the
git repository and they are substantially identical.

However, I noticed that not all the submodules have the same license as
dbus-broker, I need to complete the debian/copyright file. Also, I
noticed that Red Hat is listed as the copyright holder. Is that true for
all contributions?

> *) The dbus-broker binary itself is definitely intended to be useful
> on its own. However, no such users are known, and so far we have *not*
> stabilized its API, yet. Hence, I would not split it apart now, but
> leave it for a future extension. That is, something like a
> `dbus-broker-core` package, which just contains the broker, but not
> the launcher.

I think that having `dbus-broker` and `dbus-broker-launcher` packages
would be more logical, but I don't see reasons why the split cannot
happen when the need will emerge, or when the API will be stable.

> *) We are reworking the Fedora package at the moment. I cannot say how
> the ultimate solution will look like, but the plan right now is this:
> dbus-daemon is split into multiple packages. One packages
> (dbus-daemon-utils) provides all the utilities (dbus-send,
> dbus-monitor, ...).

I would call this `dbus-utils`, but.. bikeshedding.

> Another package (dbus-daemon) provides the daemon
> binary and its related tools (dbus-daemon, dbus-launch, ...), as well
> as a renamed service file `dbus-daemon.service`.
> For dbus-broker we provide one package that ships the broker+launcher,
> as well as the dbus-broker.service unit file.
> Lastly, we intend to recreate the `dbus` package as a simple package
> that both dbus-daemon and dbus-broker depend on, and it provides the
> daemon-xml files (config and policy).

If there is interest for dbus-broker in Debian and the dbus maintainers
agree, I can work on patches to do the same for the Debian's dbus package.

> Depending on what the default setup for your system should be, you
> should run `systemctl enable dbus-{daemon,broker}.service`. They will
> then create the dbus.service symlink. Fedora intends to use the
> systemd-presets for this.

That would need to be done differently on Debian, I guess.  I will need
to do some reading about what the correct solution would be there.

> I hope this information is of help to you!

Thank you for the detailed reply, it surely helps.

Cheers,
Dan