Re: [Bug-gnubg] CVS snapshots outdated; Freshly built RPMs

[Russ Allbery]

Michael Petch <address@hidden> writes:
> On 2012-07-19 10:38, Christopher Hofmann wrote:

>> If anybody would volunteer to contribute Ubuntu and Debian
>> control/rules I could enable building .debs in OBS.

> GNUBG is currently built under Debian, so the control/rules do exist,
> but maybe we should consider migrating those files into the GNUBG CVS
> tree. Not sure anyone would have objections to that here.

> The person who currently maintains the Debian packages is Russ Allbery.

You can certainly feel free to do whatever you would like with the files
from Debian, including keep them in the CVS repository to build unofficial
packages.  (You'd want to do a little more integration to automatically
update the version number.)

It usually doesn't make sense to try to use the upstream Debian packaging
files to build the regular Debian packages because things tend to change
in Debian and it's useful to upload new versions of the packaging without
updating to a new upstream snapshot, so I'd probably continue to maintain
my own versions, but it may make sense to periodically update the ones in
CVS from the ones in the Debian package to pick up any packaging
improvements.  (Note, though, that the Debian packaging will always target
unstable, and may use features not currently available in stable.)

The Debian packaging is available via Git at:

    http://git.eyrie.org/?p=debian/gnubg.git

Note that I don't (sadly) have time to give it lots of regular attention,
so what usually happens is that once every six months to a year, I pick up
whatever snapshot is current at that time and roll a new package, fixing
whatever else I happen to notice at the time.

There are a few changes in Debian relative to the CVS code to deal with
some Debian requirements around file layout that I have never gotten
around to writing up and contributing back properly (sorry!).  You can see
the patch at:

    http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/gnubg/0.90+20120429-1

I would greatly welcome anyone who has time to turn these into something
that could be merged upstream, or to tell me a better way of accomplishing
the same things!  The main thrust of these changes is to allow GnuBG to
load bearoff databases from /var/lib/gnubg as well as /usr/share/gnubg
because the two-sided bearoff database is generated during installation
instead of distributed in the package (due to its huge size).  There is
also a Debian-specific patch to use sensible-browser as the default web
browser.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>