On Sun, 25 Jul 1999, Alex Shnitman wrote: > IANAD [I am not a developer] but it looks to me that if the program is > useful for the general public (not only Debian users) it's better to > not make it a native debian package -- what if someone else takes > maintenance of it when you don't have time anymore; will it need to be > converted?
I'm not a developer either, but as far as I understand things, making a package a native Debian package doesn't make it only usable on Debian. It just means that there's a debian/ directory in the source distribution that contains Debian packaging info. Non-native packages, on the other hand, have a diff file to add the debian/ directory. It would still be possible to build and use the package on other architectures... it'd just ignore the debian/ directory. So making something a native Debian package is just a matter of convenience when Debian maintainer == upstream maintainer; it doesn't affect interoperability with other platforms. Chris Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
