[Pkg-xfce-devel] bringing closer the debian/ubuntu packages

Simon Huggins huggie at earth.li
Mon Aug 21 13:36:56 UTC 2006


Sorry, I've been meaning to reply to this for ages.

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 08:01:13PM +0300, Jani Monoses wrote:
> currently the xfce packages in the two distros are very divergent as
> far as the debian/ directories go. While our were based on debian's
> 4.2 packages there was little syncing in either direction since then.

> The main difference right now (modulo missing packages on either side)
> is that all ubuntu xfce packages were switched to cdbs + simple
> patchsys. Debian still hase some plain debhelper files and some uses
> of dpatch here and there.

> In addition in Ubuntu we have a specialized xfce class in cdbs
> (attached) the use of which further simplifies and modularizes the
> packages content. We need to touch every package to modify its .desktop
> file and having it done in one place in the cdbs class which is included
> by all packages helps a lot.

> I talked to huggie and corsac on irc and for the record I post here as
> well, proposing debian-xfce to adopt such a script. This way the ubuntu
> changes could be contained in this script only as opposed to scattered
> across all packages.

> We now patch cdbs, but after huggie said he'd prefer to not rely on
> the cdbs maintainer for this I also think it's better to have the cdbs
> class provided by the pkg-xfce team as well. For an example of how
> it's done outside cdbs check out ruby-pkg-tools. The ruby debian team
> has it's own cdbs stuff and it is maintained by them.

None of these are particularly good solutions for us though.  We'd need
to have a new build-depend which Ubuntu packages wouldn't incorporate
which is another difference and then we'd have to change that package
for any minor changes to our build system.

> It would be nice if all of you agreed this is a good idea :) and have
> this in place along with the upcoming 4.4 beta2.

> I'd very much like to spend as little duplicated effort on maintaining
> the packages themselves if the debian ones were suitable to use, as that
> time is put to better use by bugfixing and developing xfce upstream itself.

Sure but in that case why did you switch the Ubuntu packaging to
something entirely different moving away from our debhelped based
packaging?

It would have been much easier to merge changes - as it is now I can't
think that we will ever merge changes and patches will be applied and
bugs fixed on both sides independently.  This seems very stupid.

Simon.

-- 
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