[LAD] [LAU] Join the Debian Multimedia Team! (to improve the state of Linux audio)

[Fraser]

Fraser <fraser at arkhostings.com> writes:

> Grammostola Rosea wrote:
>
>> I suggest add a 'chapter' in the wiki of linuxaudio.org with
>> information about maintaining packages. The information about
>> Debian/Ubuntu you can find in my link. But I can imagine that also
>> other distro's like to write down some information about maintaining
>> multimedia packages, cause it would be nice if we could improve GNU/
>> Linux audio by getting more packages into the different distro's.
>
> A thought to consider - when I embarked upon creating debian and ubuntu
> packages of my own software, I found very little in the way of guides to
> assist a developer, the guides are focused on maintaining someone else's
> software (often already packaged).
>

TBH, I don't think upstream should be bugged to provide proper
packaging. I think both users and packagers benefit much more from
a proper (and flexible) build system.

> It can't hurt to educate developers on how to assemble packages for
> their own software, just making them aware of what's required will lead
> to reduced effort to package and the ones who chose to include the
> debian build files in the source shift the maintainer effort to quality
> control type role (hopefully fed back to the developer to include).

This leads IME to frustration to both upstreams and packagers.
Debianizing a package is intrinsicly a non-trivial tasks which is almost
allways done wrong in the first place. So instead of duplicating the
packaging work, it's IMO better to not have that upstream at all.

FWIW, I even tend to remove the debian/ dirs from upstream tarballs to
make it clear that the package was packaged independent. Worse, there
are technical implications due to the debian source package format,
where leaving the debian/ dir in place can lead to real problems.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4