Hi Holger!
Just a short answer from me this morning.
I wonder if you could give us/me a hand in closing the
gap between the official packages.
Good idea!
In general we are willing to drop backwards
compatibility with our install base to reach Debian standards.
I don't have a total overview of the backwards incompatible discrepancies. I probably
should have, but hopefully there aren't too many.
Ideally a user can easily upgrade from a Debian
version to our nightly builds and you and other debian developers can hopefully easily
take our source packages and move them forward as well.
Sounds convenient for the users.
Do you have experience with upstream making their own
debian packages and a proper package being included in debian as well?
No, I don't have any experience. But technically, it shouldn't be too hard. The
debian dir in the upstream tarball will always be overwritten when building the package,
so whatever you do there, will be invisible in the official package unless we manually
merge it in.
Shall I create tickets in our
osmocom.org redmine to
coordinate synchronization? Are you aware of different sysv init script names, paths for
config/hlr files, package names?
Sounds like a plan!
From a very brief look:
+ We never handled the .copyright files correctly you do
+ debian/control you have nice short and long terms descriptions we should have
+ You have patches for typos and other parts (i have pushed the ggsn one and will go
through the patches later)
+ Your have manpages and we never bothered with it. I think it is a really good debian
rule (and good Unix legacy to force a manpage for binaries in /usr!)
All the packaging is done with the same license as the upstream software, so you're
free (and encouraged!) to pull in all the things you find useful into your source tree or
debian dir.
- At least for OpenBSC you do not seem to package the
-dbg symbols. As a developer I am always annoyed (e.g. with sofia sip) when I can't
install the debug symbols.
-dbg packages are now handled automatically by Debian. Any package with binaries, will
automatically get "-dbgsym" packages. Just google it. This is also the case for
Ubuntu AFAIK. This will however not be of any help for older Ubuntu and Debian releases
(if you desire to support them also with -dbg symbols)
- You seem to not include sysvinit (and systemd)
service files?
I'm willing to add this when we're absolutely 100% sure that the default is sane
for every user. It was simply excluded from the first versions of the official packages
because I'm not familiar enough with the configuration.
Do you have a proposal on how we could move forward?
How do you manage/maintain the extra debian/ directory?
The extra debian dir is no problem. As said above, it will be overwritten automatically by
the build tools when building the package. To move forward: we just pull interesting stuff
from each other's debian dir. However, it may make sense to pull some things out of
the debian dir and into the main source tree - for instance the man pages.
Best regards
Ruben