arla Debian package

[Falk Hueffner]

Mikael Vidstedt <mikeee at stacken.kth.se> writes:

> > > since the arla package in Debian is currently in an unusable state, I
> > > considered doing my own. I have some questions for this:
> > 
> > We have talked to some lokal (debian)people to take it over, but it never
> > have happened.
> 
> It has been a rather lengthy process, since I wasn't a debian
> developer and had to get through the New Maintainer Process(tm). Now
> that I'm finally half way through the process, I've realized that my
> experience with building debian packages is not that big, and I'm
> really awaiting some help from other people right now.

Feel free to ask me :)

> The main problem is not to create the binary packages (arla & xfs.o)
> (some minor changes are made to the arla source).

Hmm, what? I didn't change anything (except fix the Makefiles).

> The problem is building the arla source package and making the
> xfs-module compile with whatever kernel is installed.

I'm not sure what you mean with "arla source package". And "making the
xfs-module compile with whatever kernel is installed" shouldn't be
harder than normally... the problem is we don't know which kernel the
user will have.

> This is an area where my lack of skill is total, since I seldom use
> the kernel-source packages in debian at all.

Uhm, I admit I've never used them :) I think I'll have a look at the
PCMCIA package; they face the same problem. Ideally, we would have an
arla-modules package for the current Debian kernel, and a
arla-modules-source package that can build an arla-modules package
when installed.

> Apart from this, there are some points where arla will not comply with
> debian standards (Gregory Stark has listed some of them in one of the
> files in the old arla package (eg. the "fs" command is a two-letter
> command)).

Well, I wouldn't worry too much about that... Standards shouldn't stop
us from deciding reasonable :)

Perhaps you could make your efforts till now available, and I could
try to merge it with mine? I could also setup a CVS repository if
there's enough interest, and I could upload the package to Debian (I
have a Debian account).

	Falk