Anyone good at packaging a library?

[Reinhard Tartler]

Am Samstag, den 28.01.2006, 15:27 +0100 schrieb Alexander Schmehl:
> I was about to package squirrel lang (ITP#344496), needed for the
> upcoming release of ppracer (and probaly other packages, too).
> [...]

> Could you help me with that, please?

Yes, could you check in our svn what you have done so far, I'd happily
take a look at this. (Although I don't claim to be an expert regarding
libraries).

The buildsystem upstream currently has is, hm. let's say quite
improvised. It shouldn't be that hard to convert it to automake and co.

Regarding the soname: Lets invent one, and propose to upstream to adopt
it. If he doesn't, I think we can maintain a 'debian specific' soname,
libsquirrel-debian.so.0 or something like that. That way we will get
binary incompatible to other distributions, though.

> PS:  Other problem of the package would be the documentation.  It's
> provided as Windows CHM-File, and AFAIK there is no free editor for that
> (only viewers).  So the documentation would need to stay in contrib,
> even if upstreams supplies usable pdf documentation - damn.

errm, why contrib? I think if the documentation itself is not free, it
should go to non-free. If it is free, but the only problem is that we
cannot create a pdf from the CHM file, I think we should place both the
CHM File and the pdf to a source tarball and distribute that in main.
That way we included the source in the 'preferred form for
modification'. We cannot, however, provide means for editing that, which
is sad, but should not be a problem for main, I think.

-- 
Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de>