Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

Post by pabs3 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

vbernat wrote: post #117

cglong wrote: post #70

As someone who's thinking about moving to Linux and has made many non-trivial contributions to Homebrew, the contribution process for Debian packages scares me. The official documentation seems to be more of a reference guide than a tutorial, and community blog posts always seem to start with "That other tool is outdated; here's the new way to do it," making it impossible to know which method is the right one. IMO, w…

Debian packaging being complex, there are many documentations around it. Packaging practices also change, but it's difficult to know which documentation is up-to-date or not. However, the very official documentation from the project is kept up-to-date: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ and https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ . But, yes, they are long and only cover the basics. There…

Post by pabs3 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 3:19 AM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #89

qpiox wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you need to get competent enough before you take on a role as package maintainer. For start, imagine that you are one. First, choose a package that really matters to you. On a daily basis. A package that you yourself would NEED to have it up2date the next day a new version is out. Get the source deb and try to build it. Usually it's not very hard. Then, try to do the same on all the debian variants (unstable, s…

That does seem like it would be a sensible way of going about things if I could manage to find a package of modest complexity that is important to me, but under-maintained.

Post by gautamcgoel » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

tuankiet65 wrote: post #110

gautamcgoel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about leaving Fedora and your comment intrigues me. Does Zoom work well with i3? Can you share your screen? Regarding PulseAudio, I didn't realize Linux users had a choice about whether to use it - is there an alternate audio subsystem available?

> Does Zoom work well with i3? Can you share your screen? Yes and yes. Source: I run Zoom with i3.

Post by BiteCode_dev » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 12:51 PM UTC

spyc wrote: post #128

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #101

Packaging for debian anything non trivial is damn too hard. It took me 5 days to figure out how to package a complete web app with params, upgrades, post install transpiling, db init, etc. And I haven't put that on a private repo yet, it's yet another annoying thing to do. Nothing is well documented, doc is old and confusing, the tooling is archaic and wants to inflict pain (debconf anyone ?), the life cycle of a Deb…

You have some points here, but the Bash part is _not_ the problem. Bash is everywhere and the true fix to that bit is to learn Bash: It's not hard and I benefit from my Bash skills everyday, it's one of the best things to invest even a bit in. Just don't write "actual software" in Bash.

Post by BiteCode_dev » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:01 PM UTC

vbernat wrote: post #114

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #101

Packaging for debian anything non trivial is damn too hard. It took me 5 days to figure out how to package a complete web app with params, upgrades, post install transpiling, db init, etc. And I haven't put that on a private repo yet, it's yet another annoying thing to do. Nothing is well documented, doc is old and confusing, the tooling is archaic and wants to inflict pain (debconf anyone ?), the life cycle of a Deb…

As for building packages for your own use, the tooling is not that difficult. The documentation is just oriented to contribute packages for Debian itself. This implies some unwanted complexity and navigating outdated documentation. Packaging for Debian becomes simpler, but it's heavily rooted into having multiple files describing the package, use of a tarball as the source package and having each language comes with…