Hi Hans, all,
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
I don't know if any of the active pure:dyne packagers are on this list, but I thought I'd try. From what I have seen, it looks like pure:dyne is doing a much better job of making .deb packages than Pd-extended. I would be great to 'officially' merge efforts so that we don't duplicate work.
Sure, we strive for high quality packages. Regarding duplication of work, the pure:dyne wiki [1] has some packaging tips, the main thing is to get a good source.deb that can then be built for any Debian-based distro. We have a pbuilder machine ready to compile packages, if anyone wants to help broaden the range of pure data related packages in pure:dyne (and eventually Debian main) you are more than welcome to join in the effort.
[1] http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/wiki/DevLounge#SoftwarePackaging
Regarding pd-extended, pure:dyne is based on pd-vanilla, which we've found to be quite stable, while pd-extended seems to have more experimental patches that don't always work out.
Also pd-extended's policy of splitting every library into tiny pieces solves one problem but causes others, so I think it was slightly premature to do the splitting until the other issues are fixed. pure:dyne policy as far as there is one is to build the way the author(s) intended, resulting in a mix of libraries and single-object externals - but our job as packagers (in the .deb sense) isn't to save the pd universe with some grand architecture, but simply to make packages available for users :)
Then we can make some really nice, proper packages and get them into Debian.
Makes sense, that's one of the key aims of pure:dyne too.
DebConf 2010 is in NYC, and I'll be helping to run it, so it would be great to have all this in Debian by then. Plus, it seems that Guenter has less time for the Debian packages, so things like the pd-externals package has lapsed.
That sounds like a good target. The pd-externals package is long obsolete (last updated 2004 iirc).
It seems to me that the next step would be to get the pure:dyne stuff into pure-data SVN, then make any tweaks to it to make it work with Pd-extended too.
We're more than happy to be good packagers and report bugs upstream, with any build patches required, but ideally there would be more upstream releases of known-quality code - currently it is still a bit hit-and-miss for some externals/libraries to know if there are unfinished pieces of code that will be fixed the next day or two, which acts as a disincentive for packagers to put the effort in to package from the svn.
Personally I'm not in favour of keeping debian/ folders in the same svn as the upstream source code, as they have rather orthogonal purposes.
Thanks, and apologies for the length,
Claude