[maemo-developers] Help needed: packaging/distributing very small C app

[From: David King]

On 2010-04-28 13:20, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>David King wrote:
>>> In addition, once something fails, it's still a bit unclear from the
>>> current docs about where to continue/repeat which steps.
>>
>> Yes, this is hard to solve in such a compact tutorial, as there are lots
>> of steps where something could fail, and it is difficult to find the
>> right balance between proding too much and too little information.
>> Contributions welcome ;)
>
>Sounds like there's a sufficient amount of material for a packaging
>troubleshooting page?

It would certainly be possible, but much of what it might say is already 
documented in the Debian packaging documentation, and other links from 
the Packaging article. A general recommendation to ask on 
maemo-developers would probably be better than trying to make 
presumptions about possible errors. A troubleshooting page could then 
be added if some common questions and answers arose.

>A packaging tutorial really should only cover the most simple things,
>and point people to canonical references where they can get more
>information. The Packaging page has already gotten too long for my
>liking, it seems like most people will only need about half of it at
>this stage, and the other half is likely to be more confusing than useful.

I split off the section on porting a Debian package to Maemo, which 
shortens the article somewhat. The majority of what remains is focussed 
on Maemo packaging specifics, with several links to reference 
documentation. The information in the new packaging guidelines page:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Packaging/Guidelines

could simplify the Packaging article further, but it is quite a long and 
dry read, so leaving the summaries as they are might be preferable.

-- 
David King | http://amigadave.com/ | davidk at openismus.com