Grammostola Rosea wrote: >> > Changed the title, cause it's an important discussion opened by Fraser imo. > > \r
I think it is, too. I've maintained a few Debain packages in the past (don't have time at the moment), so I can weigh in. The documentation is out there, but unless you're an aspiring debian maintainer it's not easy to find nor very accessible. It's a pity, because there are a few things you can do as an upstream author to make debian packaging really simple, and it's not rocket science. I'm going from memory here, but I think these are the most important things you can do: 1. Make it easy to install to an arbitrary location, a la --prefix with autotools. 2. Put stuff in the right places under that prefix (see the FHS or section 9.1 of the Debian policy manual). 3. Documentation - especially man pages which are required for all binaries (even if they just refer to online documentation or info pages). This requirement is often skipped for Ubuntu-only packages which makes me as a user sad. It's also very helpful (for maintainers and users alike) if you give a list of dependencies in your README. 4. Use a sane versioning scheme - one that monotonically increases and has the most significant parts first and doesn't use funky characters. So, if you base it on a date, 2009-04-01 or 20090401, not 1/4/2009. See section 5.6.12 of the debian policy manual. It can also be especially convenient if you use a distributed version control system, esp. git, but a good maintainer should be able to work with tarballs or whatever system you use. Encourage the debian maintainer to pass along patches or bugs and not keep them to himself, and consider keeping the debian/ directory in upstream (in ideal cases everything needed for debian packetization is there in debian/ - out of the way of non-debian users - and none of your sources need to be patched) Hope that helps. 1. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ 2. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ 3. http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
