Package management

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <87pqxy2aqd.fsf at benfinney.id.au>, Ben Finney wrote:

> Have you ever tried to make such a package and get it into Debian?

I have found it very easy to recreate the same steps used by the package 
maintainers. For instance, “apt-get source <package>” brings down the exact 
same source files used by the maintainer to build the package. Also, “apt-
get build-dep <package>” will make sure you have the right development tools 
installed to do the build. Then dpkg-buildpackage will build your own 
version of the package, in exactly the same way that the maintainers do it.

> The automation you speak of must be made and maintained by people, and
> they can only automate to the extent that the Distutils output allows.

They seem to manage it OK. Just for fun, I tried building the python-cairo 
package from source, and among the output that flew by was

       for i in 2.5 2.6; do \
          python$i-dbg ./setup.py build; \
        done

So they have found a way to automate the package build using distutils, 
rather than bypassing it.

Also it manages to perform useful-looking checks like

dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: dependency on libpthread.so.0 could be avoided if 
"debian/python-cairo/usr/lib/pyshared/python2.6/cairo/_cairo.so 
debian/python-cairo/usr/lib/pyshared/python2.5/cairo/_cairo.so" were not 
uselessly linked against it (they use none of its symbols).

Oversight in the upstream build procedure, perhaps?

Anyway, now I have my own .deb files, ready for installation.