Closing the gap between official debian and our nightly builds

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Ruben Undheim ruben.undheim at gmail.com
Thu May 26 05:30:15 UTC 2016


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



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