[Soc-coordination] libdebctrl and perlqt4 Progress Report (Week 4)

Jonathan Yu jonathan.i.yu at gmail.com
Sat Jun 20 14:15:06 UTC 2009


Hi everyone:

Since the last report I've been pretty busy. It has occurred to me
however that I need to keep a bit of a journal/diary, which I think
would help me write these progress reports. I'd also like to improve
the communication I have with my mentor -- he is in a different
timezone than me, and has two kids, which makes it a bit difficult to
find a time when we can both talk about things on IRC. Usually we just
leave messages to each other and sort of play tag for a few days,
which I suppose is similar if we e-mail. But I'd like to start
e-mailing him some progress reports every few days, some smaller
things than what I'd mail here. That way I can keep a journal of
things I've been working on while also keeping my mentor up to date
:-)

I've been working on libdebctrl for most of the time and wrestling
with the Perl Compatible Regular Expression engine that I'm not used
to, mostly. I've added some more parsing for control files. It
surprised me a bit to see how many Sections that Debian has for
software! I also refactored some important code which will make it
more useful for new developers to work on. Unfortunately the beast is
still rather undocumented, I plan to finish up some more of the coding
and then return to learn how to use Doxygen and make documentation
accordingly. Mostly the time over the last two weeks has been bug
fixes, not feature additions, but I hope that this makes code more
maintainable in the long term.

I re-installed Debian on my machine to replace Kubuntu, so that I
could get the frama-c package (which does not exist in Ubuntu). My
mentor recommended the program to me as a way to find memory leaks in
my libdebctrl code and I've been trying it out. So far, so good on
that front. For perlqt4, I was trying to compile it but got several
errors; later after discussing it with another developer on perlqt4,
we discovered that my version of libsmokeqt4 was old, as I had
suspected. But unfortunately there is not yet a libsmokeqt4-2-dev
package in Debian. So I tried to backport the one in Ubuntu, but that
one in turn depended on kde-bindings, which had a few dependencies
that Debian did not. I'm not sure what to do with that, perhaps I will
need to manually install libsmokeqt4 so I can continue work on the
bindings on Debian. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't help the
common case where packages need to be built with the perlqt4 bindings
on other machines.

I have experience with Debian Perl packages but very limited
experience with Debian packages in general. I can try my hand at
creating a basic package to include appropriate header files so I can
compile code. I plan to work with Sune to make this happen, as I
personally do not have DD status (thus cannot upload packages); and
Sune has expressed interest in having libsmokeqt4-2-dev as well, for
use in other packages.

Cheers,

Jonathan



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