Debian – Page 84

New source package formats: call for tests

March 16, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

During the last weeks I’ve been busy working on adding support of new source package formats to dpkg-source (the wig&pen format, a wig&pen variant based on quilt, Joey’s git based format integrated by djpig, …). I just reached the state where I believe the code is mostly ready to be merged in the master branch. Thus I would like some external testing and feedback.

Grab and install the package here and try building packages with dpkg-source "--format=3.0 (quilt)" -b mypackage (or any other new format). You can find more infos in the call for test on debian-dpkg (here and here). If you find regressions, please report them.

If you want to grab the latest sources, use git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git dpkg; cd dpkg; git checkout -b sourcev3 origin/sourcev3.

Help wanted: symbols files for libc6

March 4, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

As you know I implemented the support of symbols files in dpkg-shlibdeps/dpkg-gensymbols, and I would be very pleased if libc6 could start using it as most packages would then benefit from weaker dependencies on libc6 and be more easily installable on previous versions of the distribution (sid package directly installable on etch in some cases).

Some time ago I tried to get the ball rolling by providing a first patch in #462444. Unfortunately the glibc team has not been able to finish the work up to now and the base freeze is approaching… so it would be great if some people could jump in, make the required changes, test and propose a new (fully working) patch. I just sent a message to give some indications on how to get forward, hopefully that will help anyone who wants to tackle this.

Thank you for your help!

Debian Documentation Project moved to SVN, webwml might follow

March 3, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

The topic of switching from CVS to something else regularly came forward but nobody did anything. The net result is that several documentation are now maintained outside of the debian-doc repository because their respective maintainers didn’t want to stay with CVS.

After noticing that the developers-reference also switched to SVN, I decided to convert the whole debian-doc CVS repository and import it in the new “ddp” SVN repository on Alioth. This is now done.

Hopefully, the Debian Documentation Project can now again become the central place for writing good documentation about Debian. New contributors can be easily added through the DDP Alioth project. Volunteers are welcome to review what’s in the SVN and move obsolete documentation aside. People who moved away are welcome back. 🙂

Another project that also suffers from its CVS usage is the website (and it desperately needs a better design). After yet another round of discussion on #debian-devel, we agreed that discussing endlessly was not an option and that someone had to try the conversion and prepare the scripts for SVN usage. So I proposed to handle the CVS to SVN conversion and ifvoid decided to try to update the scripts. And it looks like things are progressing quite well… we included the CVS revision -> SVN revision mapping in the conversion (option –cvs-revnums of cvs2svn) and this will enable us to script the update of all translations (they encode a CVS revision to know if they are out-of-date or not). Expect to hear from us soon on debian-www@lists.debian.org…

This time of the year again

March 3, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

Yes, it’s DPL election time again. On the good side, we’ll spend less time this year than we used to thanks the constitution change. On the bad side, it seems that almost nobody is interested to run for DPL (even HE is not sure yet!).

I’ve been relatively satisfied by the work done by sam (although one can always do better) and it looks like many share this feeling… and when this is the case, we just expect the DPL to run again. But sam clearly said that he won’t run again. What a pity.

I also don’t plan to run this year[1] but I’m always interested in leadership issues and I’d gladly be part of a DPL team. Hopefully someone will provide such an alternative on the ballot this year.

Right now, I’m more in the mood of implementing some real changes (like the symbol based dependencies that I added to dpkg-shlibdeps) instead of trying to convince others to do them. When you associate this to some support of the leadership in place, it can give very good results.

Now back to real work, I still have to test and polish the dpkg-source rewrite which adds support of several brand new source package formats. Feel free to check out our progress in the sourcev3 git branch.

[1] Feel free to convince me otherwise by adding some comments here.

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