Packaging alien, debhelper and po-debconf

[Oron Peled]

On Wednesday 01 May 2013 22:21:20 Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Wed, May 01, 2013 at 03:00:34AM +0100, Sérgio Basto wrote:
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=591190
> I'm prepared to take debhelper.  But:
> (1) It looks like the latest package is over 1 year old.  I think a
>      newer package should be presented (in this bug or in a newly opened
>      one).
> (2) Can debhelper be used to make .deb's on a Fedora host?  If it
>       works, that would currently be very interesting to me.

I'll start with (2):
 * I can build .deb's on Fedora using pbuilder/pdebuild.

 * Here is the tree of RR for making it work:
       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=591388

 * Credit goes to Jeroen van Meeuwen. I just joined to help move it forward
    [ with very little success so far, mind you :-( ]

 * And yes, I think it makes Fedora a better development platform if you can
    use it to build both rpm's and deb's (on Debian, you can do both).

Now to (1)... Ouch:
 * The stalling of po-debconf is my fault, but see today's update to rhbz#591389
   (I'm fixing my ways...)

 * If we resolve it quickly, the next is debhelper (rhbz#591190). IMO the main
   blocker there is finding someone committed to review (I'm willing to maintain it).
   There's another problem in the chain (dpkg too old), but hopefully it will
   be OK soon (maintainer updated today the BR and said he would fix it RSN)

 * I uploaded a temporary pbuilder SRPM:
      http://oron.fedorapeople.org/deb-package/pbuilder-0.213-1.fc18.src.rpm
   - It's up-to-date (Debian/wheezy)
   - But I didn't have time to clean it up for review. Hope to do this in the next
     few days and update the RR.

So maybe we finally have a chance to move this along before the
dedicated bug zappers would zap it (no criticism -- they work
hard to clean the mess we leave behind us).

Unrelated note:
 * I've been using schroot(1) a lot in the last years on both Debian/Fedora to
    maintain multiple clean build environments of different OS.
 * However, one of the most useful features -- snapshots via LVM -- is not
    usable in Fedora due to rhbz#600636
 * That bug-report is stalled since 2010, and exactly a year passed since
    I sent a tested patch...

OK, back to work now.

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://users.actcom.co.il/~oron
Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware