[maemo-developers] Porting packages from debian

[From: Ryan Pavlik]

Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:55:27AM +0200, Ryan Pavlik wrote:
>   
>> Graham Cobb wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tuesday 22 April 2008 08:58:29 Arto Karppinen wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> If i get a debian package sources from debian website and compile it in
>>>> Maemo, what should i do to debian/* files?
>>>>         
> ...
>   
>>>> - Should i change myself as maintainer when i have no idea about the
>>>> internals of the lib?
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Personally I would say yes, and I do for the packages I build.  It doesn't 
>>> seem sensible to leave the maintainer set to a person who has never even 
>>> heard of Maemo and would not know how to contact me if someone contacted them 
>>> about a packaging problem.  If someone had a real query about the code I 
>>> could always pass it on to the Debian maintainer.
>>>       
> ...
>   
>> Ubuntu discussed this same thing, and ended up adding Debian Maintainer 
>> or similar field to the control file.  You might want to google for that 
>> and follow their lead, so that debian derivs get some sort of de-facto 
>> standard there.
>>     
>
> XSBC-Original-Maintainer.
>
> But then what do you do when you port a Ubuntu package that already has
> both
>
>   Maintainer: (the ubuntu person)
>
> and
>
>   XSBC-Original-Maintainer: (the debian person)
>
> in debian/control?
>
> Marius Gedminas
>   
Well, the simple answer is don't port Ubuntu packages.  Now, 
realistically speaking, there might be newer things in Ubuntu than in 
Debian that we might want, but getting everyone to play nicely with at 
least a serviceably new version in Debian (so the Ubuntu version doesn't 
have to diverge)  would be ideal.  That said, this is all easier said 
than done, and somebody with more time should really hash out some nice 
solution and propose/discuss it with all distros based on debian involved.

Pragmatically, in the case you list above, I'd vote in favor of 
replacing the ubuntu maintainer, since the presence of the debian source 
means that that is the true origin of the package, and no need to bother 
Ubuntu about Maemo bugs.

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com

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