[Debian-olpc-devel] Packaging eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) for debian

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 10:39 PM, Kandarp Kaushik <kandarp at seeta.in> wrote:
> I was trying to package eXe ( http://exelearning.org/wiki ) for 
> debian.
>
> eXe uses subversion for as the concurrency revision control system. 
> More information at: http://exelearning.org/wiki/SourceControl
>
> It will help if someone could provide some pointers on how eXe should 
> be packaged.

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 10:44:38PM +0530, Manusheel Gupta wrote:
>I think your question is on packaging, where we are using a different 
>concurrency version control system, other than git. I think the steps 
>should remain the same. Community members, please confirm if there is a 
>difference?

In our Sugar packaging we do something extraordinary: in addition to 
tracking upstream tarball releases and our packaging in git, we also 
track upstream development.

THIS IS UNSUSUAL.  It is not the normal packaging style in Debian, and 
really it has no real benefit for Debian - it only has a potential 
benefit for us in that we can easier locate when and where each upstream 
change occured - i.e. correlate not only with release summaries but with 
upstream commit messages as well, which might contain additional 
valuable info for our packaging efforts.

In other words, it is irrelevant what VCS upstream uses: ignore that an 
package their released tarballs.

And beware: you cannot directly apply the working style of Sugar 
packaging to packaging other kinds of Debian packages.  Most likely you 
need additional knowledge, and at least need to use other CDBS snippets 
(or even further changes if not using CDBS at all).

And specifically about eXe: I had a look at it some time ago, and it 
seemed abandoned upstream.  Think twice before packaging dead code: most 
likely it is more difficult to maintain because you will be the most 
knowledgable in it - there will be noone to pass on bugreports to that 
know better than yourself.  And often the code will slowly fall apart as 
surrounding compilers, libraries and toolkits gets updated.


Good luck!

   - Jonas

-- 
   * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
   * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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