[Haskell-cafe] Cleaning up the Debian act (report from the trenches)

[David Bremner]

Ketil Malde wrote:

>Another Debian question, once I've populated the debian/ directory one
>way or another, how should this be integrated with the rest of the
>project?  Should it be part of the darcs archive, or a separate
>archive (foo-debian), or what?  How do people organize this?

debian-mentors at lists.debian.org is a good place for generic debian
packaging questions.  After you have a package which works, and which
hopefully lintian (a tool for checking debian packages) does not
complain about, you can ask on debian-mentors for a sponsor, who will
check over the package and hopefully upload it. Right now there is not
too much interest in uploading new packages, because people are trying
to get lenny out the door.

If you like irc, there is also #debian-mentors on irc.oftc.net

In general the debian packaging should be maintained separately.
There are many different ways to implement this, but the end product (a
debian source package)  consists of blah.orig.tar.gz, and a blah.diff.gz
file that contains all of the debian specific changes. In practice
people maintain a seperate version control repo (or branch) for the
debian version.

John Goerzen has written a tool called darcs-buildpackage, which I
haven't used, but which might be helpful for you (there is also
git-buildpackage, and svn-buildpackage).

David