[Pkg-mc-devel] Midnight Comander 4.8.1 [RFS]

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hi Dmitry,

I'm glad to see you on board! I will accept your request for joining the
Alioth project in a minute. 

The only thing that bothers me is that at this point there are several
disparate efforts to revive the package. Have you been following the
mailing list recently?

To make to the long story short Ubuntu people are very interested in
having mc updated to the latest version before they release their next
LTS (Precise).

However, we all agree that it would be nice to have it uploaded to
Debian first and then have it autosynced into Ubuntu, so that we can
reduce the amount of duplication in our efforts.

Could you please coordinate with Maarten Bezemer, who seemed to be
interested in actually making this happen? He seems to have a branch
with updates uploaded to Launchpad already, is there anything you can
pull from him into your package?

Additionally, Andreas said he can possibly sponsor uploads and maybe
provide reviews. I'll try to make a review as well if you wish, but I'm
extremely overloaded ATM and not even a DD anyways, so...

On Sat, 2012-02-25 at 01:11 +1100, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:

> I'm an active user of midnight commander so seeing 'mc' packaging pretty much 
> dormant was breaking my heart. :)

So it does for me, but as I said I am barely able to keep myself up to
date with the list trafic not even speaking of doing any actual work. 

I figured it will be better for the Debian project if I concentrate on
keeping myself alive for the time being with the focus on continuing
with my contributions later on when things settle down a little
bit... :-)

> I seek sponsorship for this package and I hope it might be good starting point 
> for MC version 4.8.* in wheezy.

My last sponsor was Patrick Matthaei, but I hope Andreas can also help
you with that.

> One more thing: I was thinking that nowadays more and more people prefer git 
> over subversion. What do you think about moving 'mc' packaging into git 
> repository at collab-maint? Perhaps more people might find it easier to 
> contribute then...

I have no clue about collab-maint, but I think I have created an empty
repository on Alioth already. If you want to create a gbp-compatible
layout and import your DSC there to start afresh you are more than
welcome to do so.

Please also see my earlier e-mails to this list on that matter.

> ########
> 
> mc (3:4.8.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

THIS LOOKS AWESOME!!!111

Few minor comments below:

> * debian/watch
>     • fixed and updated to fetch latest .tar.xz

Did you figure what is their latest take on stable / unstable branches?
4.7.0.x used to be stable, now 4.8.x is stable or unstable?

>   * dropped CDBS, now using debhelper only

YES!

>   * debhelper & compat to version 9

Uhm, maybe go for 8, so that it can end up in backports?

>   * dh-autoreconf to update toolchain

Do we really need that?

They have been generating the build system on latest Fedora for quite
some time now, so I don't think it makes sense to re-generate it anymore
since build system being outdated is no longer a problem as they no
longer generate it on RHEL5.

> * debian/control
>       + 'autopoint' (used by autoreconf)

See above...

> * debian/copyright:
>     • audit of upstream licenses/copyrights - all information is included

Wow!

> * configure options
>     - --without-samba (obsolete)

Do you know whether they just dropped it or it was finally re-written so
that it is no longer susceptible to the CVEs due to which it was
disabled in the first place?

> * patchworks:
>     • disabled, to drop later:
>       * 99_detect_alt_editor.patch

Why? Did they upstream it or you want to go back to wrappers?

>   * architecture-independent files are separated to 'mc-data' package

Yay!

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev