[Flac-dev] debianizaton

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 08:30:48AM +0400, Severny Morskoy wrote:

> >> I think it would be nice to include debianization into CVS tree
> >> because it would help Debian users and couse no harm to others.
> JC> I am OK with that, though I don't know how practical it is.
> JC> I'll leave it up to Matt (the debian package maintainer).
>     It seemed to be very simple. Just ask Matt to move his activities
>     upon debianization directly to CVS. It will cause appearence on
>     "debian" directory with some Debian-specific files (and maybe
>     patches). So, it will be able to make .deb from CVS tree, like Ogg
>     Vorbis.

If I were to do this, it would probably be wise to keep it on a separate
branch, as the nature of Debian packages is that some changes made in the
Debian diff are not necessarily appropriate for non-Debian users (or not
yet).  A CVS branch would be the appropriate way to represent this (and in
fact, that is what I do locally).

There is also the issue of version numbering, ensuring that packages built
from CVS get an appropriate version number and entry in the changelog, and
that the Maintainer: field is not set to my address (as the package builder
could have done who-knows-what with the code).

Another issue is that the packaging stuff will occasionally fall out of sync
with the code, and people could build broken (or even, improbably,
dangerous) packages.

The debian/ directory would clearly need to be excluded from the release
tarball, since it would quickly become out of date after the release.

Someone who understands how to build Debian packages can already quite
easily build one; the packaging information is maintained as a diff against
the flac source.  Just:

- apt-get --diff-only source flac"
- apply diff
- edit control, changelog
- dpkg-buildpackage

-- 
 - mdz