[tahoe-dev] Getting Tahoe into Debian (was: Re: linking pycryptopp against system provided cryptopp)

[Brian Warner]

> There appears to be Debian packages of Tahoe already that Brian Warner has
> put some time into. I'd prefer to honor this work and offer my services as
> a Debian developer in facilitating Brian, or whoever else may be interested
> in longer-term maintenance of the packages, through sponosrship of this
> work. This would be much more interesting, in my opinion, rather than
> taking over the packaging work altogether (or re-doing it completely).
>
> Brian, are you interested in doing this? If so, I'm happy to sponsor your
> work so it can get into Debian.

Sure, that'd be great. I'm not an expert at packaging, but we do have
installable packages that seem to work well enough.

Currently we have Debian packages for everything that Tahoe needs (well,
everything that isn't already in Debian). For Tahoe and Foolscap, these are
produced by a 'make debian' -style target in a top-level Makefile, using
debian/rules files that are included in the source tree. We have support for
a number of Debian and Ubuntu releases (almost back to dapper and sarge).

When doko got Buildbot into Debian, we removed the debian/rules from the
source tree, to make it easier to apply the Debian patch: afterwards,
buildbot's upstream tarball had no debian code at all. We might want to do
the same thing with Tahoe and Foolscap.. I'm not sure. The advantage is that
it would make things easier for the Debian folks, the disadvantage is that
it's still sometimes handy to be able to make a .deb out of a darcs checkout,
without downloading and applying a separate patch. I suppose this is the
difference between a "native debian package" and the other kind.

We have an APT-installable repository that holds the .debs we've created
(populated by a Buildbot for Tahoe, and manually by me for Foolscap
releases). 'deb http://allmydata.org/debian/  DIST  main tahoe' in your
/etc/apt/sources.list will hit it. There are source packages (sort of) for
everything but Tahoe, but at least the Foolscap ones are byproducts of the
build process (I haven't actually tried to build a .deb from them).

Incidentally, I saw an ITP for Foolscap pass by a few weeks ago.

I'll let Zooko address his packages (pycryptopp, zfec, and some other
utilities).. I know he's used stdeb to create installable packages, but I'm
not sure what the actual process is.


thanks,
 -Brian