[Xastir] A bit of intro to CVS

[James Cameron]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:41:45PM -0700, Curt, WE7U wrote:
> I don't know anything about Debian directories, [...]

In brief, it's a new directory called debian/ which has a few files
peculiar to the build on the target distribution.

It can be found in the packaging patch done by a distribution packager.

Xastir 1.9.4 on Debian, for example, despite being quite old ... has a
patch at http://packages.debian.org/sid/xastir
which is
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/xastir/xastir_1.9.4-3.1.diff.gz

... I've unpacked and run source-highlight over this, you can see the
result at
http://quozl.us.netrek.org/tmp/xastir_1.9.4-3.1.diff.html for a while.

It adds only these files to debian/

+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/rules
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/control
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/copyright
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/xastir.menu
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/compat
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/xastir.dirs
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/changelog
+++ xastir-1.9.4/debian/watch

The rest of the patch deals with changes made by the packager to meet
Debian standards or fix bugs that are not necessarily pushed upstream to
you.

(This can be a useful source of fixes that haven't made it back to the
upstream project.  I've often found things to fix in pptp or pptpd based
on what the packagers in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, or OpenSuSE have had to
do to get my code to work properly on their distribution).

> If we get involved in making specific changes to try to track with
> the latest version of specific operating systems, we'll not do a
> good job of it and be forever out-of-date.

Yes, that is a risk.  As the upstream, *you* should concentrate on being
general, and distribution agnostic.

> Not to mention that if we try hard to keep everything current we'll
> spread already-thin resources even thinner.

However, there exists resources that are available for distribution
specific work that are not available for upstream work.  In particular
those technical amateurs who know how to package, how to script, but
don't want to take on a large design change to Xastir itself.  It is
their itch to scratch.

By enabling these resources (by welcoming distribution specific work in
a limited fashion), you will gain *more* resources for the project as a
whole.

> Our project has worked fairly well so far (since 1999) by staying as
> generic as possible, releasing source versions only.

I would not expect that to change; yet if you permit packaging specific
code hosting that does not interfere with your core mission, you will
facilitate a wider user base.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/