Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE people...

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Dec 14, 2014, at 3:39 PM, Pedro Neves <nevesdiver at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Dirk
> 
> On 12/14/2014 08:56 PM, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>> So I have been told by people who are much more familiar with Ubuntu and Debian than I am that I should be able to use pretty much the same scripts that I have for Ubuntu (and LinuxMint) to build a Debian package. Could someone elaborate on this? And where would I post those - there doesn’t appear to be a PPA style system for Debian (at least not that I’m aware of).
> 
> I'm using the package built for Ubuntu on my Debian/Sid system, with no problems.

So you simply download the .deb (from where?) and install it directly? Cool.

> There's Subsurface packages on the Debian repositories. Do you know the maintainer? Can we approach him and check what the procedures are regarding the uploading of packages in the official repositories?

The problem is that I am 99.99% sure that the way I package Subsurface violates a few Debian packaging rules.
Which is done intentionally. I do NOT WANT to use the library from the Marble package - that keeps causing problems. Similarly, I want to statically link against libgit2 (as that has issues and I believe is still not in Debian stable). And of course I’m using private branches for both libmarblewidget and libdivecomputer - also not allowed.
And I bet there’s another two dozen rules (the third line of this file needs to end with two spaces, a period and the UTF8 symbol for the artist formally known as Prince…).
Oh, and of course I don’t follow their changelog rules, either.

So, no, I don’t think this will ever become an official package. And I don’t consider that an issue. I consider this a feature.
The way Linux distributions do packages is stupid, broken, archaic and completely misses the point of what both app developers or end users need.

Yes, I have very strongly held feelings about this. I used to be the CTO of a Linux distribution and I lost this fight when I was there. I’m tired of fighting this fight, instead I’ll happily just work around this.

What I care about is to make things easier for our users (the few that we have that aren’t on Windows/Mac/Ubuntu)

So if the Ubuntu .deb simply installs I think we’re done here. I just need to put it on our server in addition to the PPA.

/D