Ideas for packaging FreeBSD binaries

[Aurelien Jarno]

Robin Elfrink a écrit :
> Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> 
> 
>>Well the other possibility is also to get the sources from CVS, it's the
>>way the kernel and freebsd5-buildutils are done.
> 
> 
> Is that preferable? What does one know of stability/security in CVS? Or
> would you just point at a certain branch/tag ?

I don't know if it is preferable or not, it may depend on what you 
package and the way you package it. I mean in your case using the 
tarball could be a waste of space (see the other paragraph below). But 
for a single apps, that could be a good solution.

For the CVS, I usually use the latest CVS version available for a given 
branch, which means it includes the latest security patches. The 
security patches that are published later are then put in the 
debian/patches directory in order to avoid to recreate the .orig.tar.gz.

>>On another side, a too big source package will be difficult to maintain.
>>What about make one source package by category. For example:
>>
>>freebsd-netutils: pf, ifconfig, netstat, route, ...
>>freebsd-hwutils: atacontrol, kbdcontrol, disklabel, ...
>>freebsd-kernelutils: kldutils, ktrace, mdconfig, dmesg, sysctl, ...
>>
>>The exact names and the contents of the differents binaries packages
>>could vary, but here is the idea.
> 
> 
> Well, /sbin binaries in FreeBSD come from one tarball, so that's the one
> I used (and that's why my source package is named 'freebsd-sbin').
> 
The problem I see there is that we won't package all /sbin binaries from 
this package, as some of them will probably be provided by other debian 
package. This also mean we will have to check license issues for all 
stuff in the tarball instead of only the license of the /sbin binaries 
we want to provide. This will probably be more true for the bin package.

And moreover a binary in /sbin in FreeBSD could be placed in /bin in 
Debian and vice-versa.

What the others thing about my proposal?

Byen
Aurelien

-- 
   .''`.  Aurelien Jarno	            | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
  : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux developer | Electrical Engineer
  `. `'   aurel32 at debian.org         | aurelien at aurel32.net
    `-    people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net