Hi all,
I set out this weekend to get up to speed on maintaining and packaging
Debian packages and spent many hours reading documentation and playing
around with the tooling surrounding building packages.
This prompted me to drop in here to say just how darned impressive
everything is. The documentation is both helpful and extensive, and the
tooling is just amazing. I could give example after example of the
things that impressed me, but I'll spare your inboxes and mention just a
few:
1) Debmake's ability to produce a mostly working control information
file set from any random source tarball seems nearly magical.
2) It's amazing how easy it is to set up a chroot'd build environment
and use it to test package builds, which is incredibly essential if for
no other reason than because it makes it trivially easy to figure out
what dependencies you need to list in your control file.
3) Lintian's ability to find and flag most of the issues that detract
from package quality and may prevent it from being accepted is both
impressive and useful.
I've been maintaining free software for 30 years so I've got a lot of
experience with a lot of different tools, and I've rarely encountered
anything that is as comprehensive and well-documented as all this stuff is.
To be sure, there's a huge amount to learn! But to me, at least, it
doesn't seem like that's because there's a lot of cruft. On the
contrary, the stuff that's there seems absolutely necessary to maintain
high quality in Debian.
Thank you so much to everyone who has worked on this.
Regards,
Jonathan Kamens
