Dan Nicholson wrote: > Perhaps you can answer me a question then. What's the easiest way to > analyze the Debian packages? Right now, I always have to download the > _orig and the diff.gz and wade through the myriad files in the debian/ > directory.
The _orig is the original upstream tarball, possibly recompressed with gzip. If "dfsg" appears in the name, then Debian thinks that upstream really has no permission to distribute some original files under a free license, and the tarball does not have such files. The only files under "debian" that you want to look at are: debian/changelog: the changelog. "FTBFS" means "failed to build from source", "NMU" = "non-maintainer upload". debian/control: contains descriptions of the resulting binary packages and the dependencies. debian/rules: the build script (or, more precisely, a Makefile). It is supposed to be executable. The relevant target is "binary" (i.e., "fakeroot debian/rules binary" is the Debian way to build binary packages from source). If you want to see quickly what is inside the diff, install Midnight Commander, navigate to the diff, and press Enter on it. Then you can copy the relevant parts out. As an alternative method, most of Debian diffs apply even without the package - just run "zcat ../package.diff.gz | patch -Np1" in an empty directory. As for their Qt install: they set QTDIR only during the build. The normal environment does not have this variable, and "make xconfig" works fine in the kernel tree. So maybe this variable is needed only with the /opt method? > What would make things far easier is if there was something > like the viewcvs interface for fedora. > > http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/devel/ > > Anything like that? A changelog perhaps? There is no central CVS-like repository for such things, but http://snapshot.debian.net/ contains sources and diff.gz files for all versions released in the past (except for those removed for licensing reasons). See also: http://packages.qa.debian.org/qt-x11-free http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/q/qt-x11-free/current/changelog -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
