[Pkg-ace-devel] Bug#746825: help

[Barak A. Pearlmutter]

As the Debian ivtools maintainer, I'd be interested in helping to solve
this.  I did an NMU of ace in October to recompile with a new toolchain,
to keep ivtools happy.

It now appears that more is needed.  I'd be happy to help, even to
co-maintain a bit if the ACE maintainer so desires.

But the packaging does look pretty complicated.  The upstream build
system is MPC, so there's that learning curve.  The debian/rules file is
not making full use of the more recent debhelper facilities, but it's
not clear to me that updating it in this fashion would really help with
keeping the package up to date.  Something that automatically pulled
lists of files from the upstream build system (using executable
debian/*.install files, say) might make it easier to automatically
adjust to modified files in the installation, rather than having to do a
laborious reactive manual process per debian/README.source

Upstream assistance in doing things to make this easier to package, and
in making suggestions for adjusting the packaging for a better impedance
matching with the build system, might help a lot.  E.g., are all the
little separate library packages (72 of them) necessary, or should some
of them be merged?  Naturally things that make this easier to package
for Debian would probably also make it easier in other systems, like
Redhat.

Thoughts?

					--Barak.
--
Barak A. Pearlmutter
 Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
 http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/