[845] in athena10
[Fwd: Re: Debian packaging exercises]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Yang Zhang)
Wed Jan 14 17:32:00 2009
Message-ID: <496E679C.3060901@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:30:52 -0500
From: Yang Zhang <y_z@MIT.EDU>
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To: debathena@mit.edu
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I had a general question about Debian packaging, after taking Evan's
Debian Packaging IAP class, and he directed my question here.
In the changelog, I need to specify the distro version that I'm
releasing for:
helloworld (1.0-1ubuntu1) intrepid; urgency=low
or
helloworld (1.0-1) unstable; urgency=low
Why must I specify the distro version (unstable, intrepid, etc.)? Can't
a package exist for many distro versions? The package needs requires a
new entry recorded in the changelog for each distro version (the package
can only serve one at a time)? I'm wondering how I can simply release a
package for the latest versions of both the Debian and Ubuntu distros
(with minimal tedious labor :) .
A more detailed elaboration of my question follows.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Debian packaging exercises
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:01:07 -0500
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
To: Yang Zhang <y_z@mit.edu>
References: <496464D2.9080709@mit.edu> <49646D7B.9090802@mit.edu>
<4964B8A5.5040005@mit.edu> <49652113.3060004@mit.edu>
<49652D51.8060202@mit.edu> <49653B02.7060502@mit.edu>
<49653BF4.3080609@mit.edu> <49653CA3.5060900@mit.edu>
<49653DCF.8040307@mit.edu> <49654098.9020604@mit.edu>
<49654237.5000807@mit.edu> <496587C8.20709@mit.edu>
<496588D8.6020707@mit.edu> <4965997F.5090905@mit.edu>
<49659C16.2050302@mit.edu> <4965AA3E.7000902@mit.edu>
<49670A9B.4090404@mit.edu> <496BB336.2090206@mit.edu>
<496E5FDC.7000908@mit.edu>
Yang Zhang wrote:
> Evan Broder wrote:
>> First, it's not common to target packages at multiple releases. With
>> Debian, you always upload to either unstable or experimental, and with
>> Ubuntu, you always upload for the next stable release. The distribution
>> is just the release that you're targetting right now.
>>
>> Debathena and Invirt use "unstable" as the distribution for all of our
>> packages.
>
> I'm writing software packages that I'd like to release to the world,
> and one way to make them more easily accessible to many people is to
> release them as Debian packages (perhaps hosted in my PPA or even
> pushed into Debian). Or perhaps I'll one day be interested in
> Debianizing software written by others.
>
> Do I need to maintain multiple sets of packaging files/scripts, one
> for every version of every distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.)? Wouldn't
> there be a great deal of repetition among these sets? How might I
> minimize the amount of stuff I need to maintain (work I need to do)?
> Is the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu such that I can just
> target one of them, and the package will propagate to the other(s)?
>
> Going into slightly more detail: Say I just need to target one thing,
> and that it's Debian unstable. What if I develop on Ubuntu? I'd run
> into something like
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lintian/+bug/273997 (I got a
> "bad-distribution-in-changes-file" error).
>
> Yang
Yeah, I honestly don't have a good answer for you. You should maybe
e-mail debathena@ - someone there might know.
- Evan
