Ludovic Brenta wrote: > Álex R. Mosteo writes: >>> There are lots of tutorials for packaging beginners, but usually these >>> stick to the author's workflow of choice, and I haven't found a clear >>> comparison between alternatives. Also some of these are, while seemingly >>> still valid, possibly somewhat outdated in regard to recent >>> developments. E.g. I see different compat values (which everybody is >>> happy to dismiss as "you don't need to understand this yet") that tell >>> me that I might be reading stale information. >> >> OK, a follow-up. I had missed the obvious "packaging-tutorial" package, >> which has helped me a lot to understand the status of affairs. It says >> that dh is the safest way so it narrows down a bit the priority of my >> reading. >> >> Nonetheless, any insights, particular to Ada or not, that you might want >> to share are welcome. > > The need for a tutorial specific to Ada has been identified several > times in the past. The reasons why such a tutorial does not exist yet > include: > > - lack of time on everyone's part > - the "recommended" packaging scheme is a moving target > - we'd feel forced to upgrade all existing packages to this "standard" > i.e. extra packaging work
Understandable. > When I started packaging in 2003, dh did not exist and I used the > predefined dh_make templates of the era as a starting point. After > some time, as I gained better understanding of each command, I started > removing all unnecessary bits such as the autotools; I even went so far > as to patch some upstream sources not to require autotools anymore. > The result is that each package that I made is pretty minimal (that > does not mean small), hand-written and there is no "standard template". > > More recently, Nicolas Boulenguez revisited several of my packages and > invented the ALDH system, which I think is the current state of the > art. It is clean, maintainable and uses "dh" as recommended by recent > versions of debhelper. The drawback of Nicolas' system is that it > requires good knowledge of Makefile syntax, as it uses GNU Make > macros. Also, it only uses recent debhelper compatibility levels; > this may make it more difficult to backport packages to old stable > versions of Debian, should the need arise. Then I conclude that either hand-written, if the package is simple enough or needs good back-compatibility, or the ALDH system are the best approaches at the moment. > A note about debian/compat: it contains the "debhelper compatibility > level", a version number (in ASCII) that all debhelper commands read > before anything. The value of this version number affects the behaviour > of some commands. For details, see the man page, debhelper(7). From > time to time, the minimum value that debian/compat can contain is > incremented by a new version of debhelper, forcing all packages using > debhelper to upgrade. The values currently accepted by debhelper are > 5..9 (8 is recommended and 9 is experimental ATM). > > Nicolas, would you have time to write at least a one-page description of > ALDH for the novice packager, as an appendix in the Debian Policy for > Ada? That would make it possible for more packagers to consider using > it the next time they upgrade their packaging scripts. > > In the mean time, I concur with Xavier: looking at small, simple existing > packages is the best way to learn. Thanks both of you for your comments. I hope to be back soon with my first package at the ready. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
