Trivial Garbage package

Luca Capello luca at pca.it
Mon Nov 17 22:21:26 UTC 2008 

Hi Barry!

I am sorry for the long mail, but I can be very verbose sometime...

Since we discussed on IRC, you know why I was late ;-)

On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:52:48 +0100, Barry deFreese wrote:
> I apologize for posting to the development list but I've been trying
> to catch someone on IRC to no avail.

FWIW, I *always* prefer discussions to take place on mailing lists,
since they are archived and can be referenced later.

> I had a friend of mine ask me to package trivial garbage.  I have
> created a package but I really would hate to be the maintainer as I am
> not much of a lisp person.  Would you folks possibly be interested in
> maintaining it?

I will speak for myself here, but I think Peter's opinion is not so far
From mine: I would be glad to have another CL library under the team
umbrella.  However, I am not sure I will ever use trivial garbage [1],
which means that if your friend use it and you provide some sort of
support to him, you can become a team member and maintain it by
yourself.  The team can take care of it, but this should be the last
option.

> If not would you mind at least looking over my package to see if I am
> doing the right thing with it?

Sure, here my comments on the package available on mentors.d.o [2].  For
the list readers, most of these comments will end up in the long-overdue
"Debian Common Lisp Policy", which I still need to write.


1) debian/changelog

   I do not like to retroactively modify previously released files,
   which means that if you do not have an ITP number when your package
   goes public, just ignore it.  I do not consider the corresponding
   lintian warning [3] so important, since AFAIK the ITP is not
   mandatory and sometime I do not see the point in it.

   In this specific case, Matthias Benkard (cc:ed) opened the ITP [4]
   (cc:ed as well): Matthias, do you want to maintain trivial-garbage?


2) debian/control

   * Build-Depends

     SBCL is not needed, only debhelper and dh-lisp.

   * Maintainer/Uploaders

     Please always use the Debian CL team for the Maintainer: field (as
     you did, thank you) and your name for the Uploaders: one: it does
     not matter if you are not the real uploader, but you are the one
     who did the packaging work and you deserve credits for that.

   * Homepage

     Is there any reason for using a specific revision for the Cliki
     homepage?  I would use instead the "plain" link [5]: if you use a
     specific revision, we will need to change it every time there is a
     new Debian version.

   * Vcs-*

     trivial-garbage is maintained upstream in darcs [6], before any
     upload to main the Debian package should be converted to darcs and
     put into the pkg-c-l darcs.d.o space [7].  Then you can check
     cl-arnesi for the corresponding Vcs-* fields [8].

     Since you need to be part of the team to work on the pkg-c-l
     darcs.d.o space, I already did it for the trivial-garbage.upstream
     repository [9]:

      [alioth]
       everything as explained at [7], except that I commented out the
       bcc: mail to trivial-garbage_cvs at p.qa.d.o since the package is
       not yet in Debian

      [local]
       $ darcs get --tag 0.17 \
          http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/darcs/trivial-garbage/ \
          trivial-garbage.upstream
       $ cd trivial-garbage.upsream
       $ darcs tag UPSTREAM_trivial-garbage_0.17
       $ darcs push \
          gismo at alioth.debian.org:/darcs/pkg-common-lisp/trivial-garbage.upstream

     Now you should get the upstream repository, import your first
     debian/ folder effort and then fix it:

       $ darcs get \
          http://darcs.debian.org/darcs/pkg-common-lisp/trivial-garbage.upstream \
          trivial-garbage
       $ cd trivial-garbage
       $ cp -r /path/to/trivial-garbage-0.17/debian .
       $ darcs record -A "Barry deFreese <bdefreese at debian.org>" \
          -m "Import Debian version 0.17-1"
       $ darcs tag DEBIAN_trivial-garbage_0.17-1
       $ [start fixing] 

     I can import your first Debian effort if you want, but if you do it
     you will practise a bit with darcs as well ;-)

     Since the team packages are maintained with the $VCS-buildpackage
     tools, please read the darcs-buildpackage [10] documentation or just
     check cl-arnesi [8].

     I will not care too much about the upstream original .tar.gz: since
     we track upstream VCS repository and upstream correctly tags each
     release, we will just tag the Debian upstream one accordingly.
     Thus, while the .orig.tar.gz generated by darcs-buildpackage will
     not be exactly the same as upstream one, the contents will.  Or we
     can use upstream one and feed it to darcs-buildpackage.  Obviously,
     I am open to any discussion on this subject ;-)

   * Description

     While it is correct, I would expand it a bit more to include some
     features, similar to cl-arnesi [11].


3) debian/copyright

   Please enclose every e-mail address between < and >, you missed that
   for yours.  You have not specified which GPL version your work is
   licensed under, AFAIK this is mandatory.  And you should include the
   GPL "headers" as well, again check the cl-arnesi copyright as an
   example [12].


4) debian/docs

   I tend to avoid useless files when possible, which means that I
   prefer adding to debian/rules:

     dh_installdocs README


5) debian/install

   The .asd file works as an "indicator" of what should be compiled, in
   this case it expects trivial-garbage.lisp and tests.lisp on the same
   folder as itself.  Since you have not modified the .asd file, while
   the package installation is OK, when you compile the CL sources you
   get an error.  The solution is simple: just install both .lisp files
   into /u/s/c-l/source/cl-t-g/, together with the .asd one.  Doing so,
   you can get rid of the debian/install file adding to debian/rules:

     dh_install t* usr/share/common-lisp/source/cl-trivial-garbage/


6) debian/rules

   It is already OK, but I really prefer the two modifications above,
   which works as expected.


It should be enough for today :-D

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://www.cliki.net/trivial-garbage
[2] http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor-pkglist?action=details;package=trivial-garbage
[3] http://lintian.debian.org/tags/new-package-should-close-itp-bug.html
[4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=469982
[5] http://www.cliki.net/trivial-garbage
[6] http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/darcs/trivial-garbage/
[7] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-common-lisp-devel/2008-January/000021.html
[8] http://darcs.debian.org/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=pkg-common-lisp/arnesi;a=headblob;f=/debian/control
[9] http://darcs.debian.org/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=pkg-common-lisp/trivial-garbage.upstream;a=summary
[10] http://packages.debian.org/sid/darcs-buildpackage
[11] http://packages.debian.org/sid/cl-arnesi
[12] http://darcs.debian.org/cgi-bin/darcsweb.cgi?r=pkg-common-lisp/arnesi;a=headblob;f=/debian/copyright
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