Re: porting a package
On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Ben Collins wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 08, 1999 at 02:48:43PM +0200, Fernando Sanchez wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I have found that a package for which I am not the maintainer
> > (ocaml) is not being built for i386 architecture in its latest versions (it
> > is ok for powerpc and alpha). I have tried to compile it for i386 and there
> > have been no problems, so I'm thinking about uploading it as binary-only as
> > it is explained in Debian Developer's Reference. Questions:
> >
> > - is there any problem in doing this? Should I report it to someone, or is
> > it ok if I just upload ocaml_2.02-5_i386.deb as usual?
> >
> > - resulting package is not totally "lintian-clean": it complains about a
> > lacking man page and man pages placement not being FHS compliant. Should I
> > patch it and report it as a bug, wait for the maintainer upload which
> > corrects the bug and port it then to i386 architecture, or is it better if I
> > solve the problem now and upload it as binary-only?
>
> If you port a package (ie, simply compile it for an architecture which it
> is not compiled for) you can upload it without problems given a few guide
> lines:
There is an i386 build demon which should automatically pick up those
packages, but ocaml is in non-free, I think the build demons take packages
only from main? The maintainer released it a source and PowerPC deb, the
alpha deb was not announce on debian-devel-changes it seems, m68k and i386
lag behind a bit. I dont know if the alpha demon built the package, but I
think that the m68k demon only build packages from main, contrib, non-free
and non-US are usually built "by-hand", ie not automatically.
I dont think the build demons will pick up non-main packages in the near
future, but maybe we could have a quinn-diff running on contrib and the
non-* directories, so that we at least know when something is not up to
date. And somebody could step forward and build packages which were released
as source and non-i386.debs? Or is it the responsibility of the source
maintainer to find somebody to build it for other arches?
Ciao,
Christian.
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