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Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package

November 5, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

In the comments of the article explaining how to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package, I got asked if it was possible to apply a patch only in some distribution. And indeed it is.

The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists.

So what’s the best way to use this? Debian should always provide debian/patches/series, they are supposed to provide the default set of patches to use. Any derivative cooperating with Debian can maintain their own series files within the common VCS repository used for package maintenance. They can drop Debian-specific patches (say branding patches for example), and they can add their own on top of the remaining Debian patches.

It’s worth noting that it’s the job of the maintainers to keep both series files in sync when needed. dpkg-source offers no way to have stacked series files (or dependencies between them).

If you want to use quilt to edit an alternate series file, you can temporarily set the QUILT_SERIES environment variable to “vendor.series”. Just make sure to start from a clean state, i.e. no patches applied. Otherwise quilt will be confused by the sudden mismatch between the series file and its internal data (stored in the .pc directory).

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Wiki page to share Debian presentations and associated templates

November 3, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

After having created my Debian presentation template, I wanted to share it so that future speakers can reuse my work. Surely there should be a place for this. I quickly found Ubuntu’s dedicated wiki page, and for Debian the relevant place was on the website.

However looking at that page, it’s obvious that the website is not the proper place: the page has not been updated with new talks since 2005. It’s just to much burden for any speaker. A wiki page is much more convenient in that regard. Switching to the wiki means we loose translations but that’s still better than an outdated translated page on the website.

So I went ahead, I created http://wiki.debian.org/Presentations and I filed a bug against www.debian.org to suggest to move the content to the wiki (see #601337) and to leave a link pointing to the new wiki page.

So the content of the website needs to be injected into the wiki. This is an easy task for someone that wishes to start contributing to Debian. Thus it’s your task.

Once completed send a mail to 601337@bugs.debian.org to inform the webmasters that the wiki part of the work has been completed. They just have to drop the old pages and replace them with links to the wiki.

PS: If you have given a Debian talk recently, please put your slides online and link to them on the new wiki page.

5 free software to support with Flattr

November 1, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

Flattr FOSS LogoIt’s already the fourth issue of Flattr FOSS: it means 20 different projects using Flattr that I presented you. Here are the 5 suggestions for November:

  1. Redshift is a small utility that adjusts the color temperature of your screen to make it less aggressive on your eyes, in particular during evening/nights. It uses the time of the day and the geographic location to know whether it’s night or day. I discovered it this summer and I liked it, although I’m not running it permanently.
  2. Noscript is a Firefox plugin to control what sites can execute javascript, flash and other plugins. All those are creating supplementary security risks and you browse safer if you allow only some sites to run them. This is the number one entry on Flattr in the opensource category, it recently took the place of dpkg.
  3. phyMyAdmin is a web interface to manage MySQL databases. If you have such a database on a web-hosting service, you have likely already seen it in action. It’s an award-winning software with a 12 year history, it’s not so common for PHP applications. 🙂
  4. Chromium maintenance in Debian. Chromium is a rapidly-evolving & complex software and Giuseppe Iuculano has been tirelessly working on packaging it. Almost alone within Debian. He deserves kudos for his work even though he reused work made by Fabien Tassin on the Ubuntu package.
  5. Dulwich is a pure-Python implementation of the Git file formats and protocols. It’s an important building block for interoperability between Bazaar and Git: bzr-git (a Bazaar plugin providing Git integration) is notably using it. Given the large usage of bzr in Ubuntu and the popularity of Git world-wide, it’s important to have such gateways.

This article is part of the Flattr FOSS project.

Update: mentioned the work of Fabien Tassin on the chromium package within Ubuntu.

Latest features of dpkg-dev: debian packaging tools

October 30, 2010 by Raphaël Hertzog

I’m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev—the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development.

My talk covered the following topics:

  • Support of symbols files by dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gensymbols
  • Support of new source formats by dpkg-source
  • Supplementary options for dpkg-source
  • Cross distribution collaboration with dpkg-vendor
  • Custom compilation flags with dpkg-buildflags
  • Miscellaneous improvements to other tools

The slides are relatively verbose so that you can understand them even if you did not attend the talk. Click here to get the slides.

Related links

This section points to various articles that cover more extensively some of the features mentioned in my talk.

Concerning dpkg-source:

  • About new source formats
  • How to customize dpkg-source’s behaviour in your Debian source package
  • How to create Debian packages with alternative compression methods
  • How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages?
  • Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package

Concerning dpkg-maintscript-helper:

  • Correctly renaming a conffile in Debian package maintainer scripts
  • The right way to remove an obsolete conffile in a Debian package

Concerning dpkg-vendor:

  • How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package
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