[Pkg-freeipmi-devel] freeipmi packaging RFH [question to Albert]

[Albert Chu]

On Thu, 2012-07-05 at 07:49 -0700, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:
> Hi Albert,
> 
> Great news are that
> 
> - upcoming Debian wheezy should have 1.1.5
> 
> - popularity of freeipmi is rocketing in Debian land
> 
>  http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=freeipmi

That's awesome!

> - a team (me + Ferenc Wagner + Bernd Zeimetz) is forming to
>   maintain freeipmi  in Debian, so now keeping it up-to-date and in
>   great shape should be easier.  If in future you are having any
>   concerns, feel free to drop a note to the list (we will update our
>   Maintainer: field in the package as well some time soon ;) )
> 
> Now a little question:
> 
> > >> - we might need to sanitize .orig (into +ds1) to remove pregenerated
> > >>   source files which get modified by build process... 
> 
> 
> So, Albert, in the distributed tarball you ship quite a few of
> pregenerated source files/manpages/stamp files altogether with original
> sources.  I understand the reason behind 'make src' "source
> distribution" autoconf provides,

I assume you mean 'make dist'?

> but imho as years passed and
> software/tools distribution became more robust I wonder if you
> have any plans to switch to distributing pristine vanilla source
> tarballs  requiring full autoconf/configure/make chain? ;)

Historically, my understanding is that shipping w/ the pre-generated
configure, Makefile.in, etc. is necessary b/c you don't know what
version of autoconf/automake/etc. the end user might have on their
system.  If their autoconf/automake is too old/new, then the build may
break.  I know I've personally encountered this issue.

> Having both original and pre-generated sources makes clean packaging a
> bit more awkward for us (as you might have mentioned with those patches
> I have sent needing to modify both original and generated manpages ;)
> )...62  

I am far more familiar with rpm based packaging, so perhaps I don't
understand the difficulty you guys would have with the way I package.
What difficulty arises?

> We wondered if you have a strong opinion bout shipping
> pre-generated "source" files, or could you distribute a "pristine
> sources" tarball.

It's not a personal "strong opinin", but it seems what most people do??
That's my personal experience atleast.  I could be very very wrong.

> Otherwise we might just need to repackage it while
> removing all pregenerated files, or package straight from SVN (as I did
> before with your CVS I believe), or look at build-time solutions to
> preserve them through the build...

I was just about to say, maybe it'd be easiest to just pull from SVN
after I do a release?  I always tag with the same pattern, so it should
be easy to script?

> Thanks in advance for your reply

No problem, thanks for your work packaging for Debian.  I'm glad to work
with you guys to help make things easier for you on your end.

Al

> > ...
> 
> > We could just remove them in the clean target, or move them away to some
> > directory and move them back in clean.
> 
> NB I wonder if dh_autoreconf could be of help here.  And to progress
>    faster, let's ask our very responsive upstream (our list should be
>    public AFAIK, please report if you can't post in private)
> 
-- 
Albert Chu
chu11 at llnl.gov
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory