Bug#644019: reglookup: Please package latest upstream (1.0.1)

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi Tim,

On Fri, 05 Jun 2015, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Wed, 03 Jun 2015, Tim wrote:
> > Yeah, it's sad.  I need some one to *help* me package it and take
> > ownership of the packaging.  There's very little maintenance at this
> > point, since there's not really any active feature development and
> > infrequent releases.  It's just a matter of getting over the major
> > build changes betwween 0.12 and later versions.
> > 
> > At one point one of the DFF guys said they created debian packages for
> > it, but in a brief search I haven't been able to find them.
> 
> My intervention here is directly related DFF. In Kali we got this request:
> https://bugs.kali.org/view.php?id=2290
> 
> We will update reglookup in Kali and contribute the changes back to
> Debian.

We started working on this update but there are multiple problems:

* The library is not versioned, you need to have proper SONAME management
  for libraries packaged in Debian.
  https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide#Libraries
  (this is really important for us, only versioned libraries can be
  represented in the automatic library dependency mechanism)

* SCons does not allow us to inject hardened build flags in CFLAGS,
  LDFLAGS, CPPFLAGS:
  https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide#SCons

* SCons does not allow us to install files in a destination directory
  different from / (we use the DESTDIR variable for this)

* SCons is not standardized at all and thus debhelper has no support for
  it... which means that we can't benefit freely from stuff like multiarch
  support which requires us to install the libraries in an
  architecture-specific path.

And also some things which could be improved:

* please rename "pyregfi-distutils.py" to "setup.py" so that it can be
  automatically detected by our build tools

* don't call ldconfig (we do not run build process as root, the install
  step is run under fakeroot and any operation requiring real root rights
  will fail)

In general, it would be nice if you could use something else than SCons...

You can also have a look at other sections of the upstream guide that I
linked to as you might find some useful data that would make our lives
easier.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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