[Help-smalltalk] Packaging GNU Smalltalk .star archives

[Thomas Girard]

Hello,

I'm about to upload gst 2.95f packages to Debian experimental. But I'm
not sure how to package .star archives yet.

I don't think it makes sense to put every .star archive in its own
Debian package. At the very least .star archives depending on external
libraries should go in a separate package, so that packages containing
those external libraries are pulled only when needed.

That would give something like:
 * gnu-smalltalk-gtk for GTK.star, BloxGTK.star and gst-gtk.so
 * gnu-smalltalk-tk for BloxTK.star and blox-tk.so
 * gnu-smalltalk-ncurses for NCurses.star
 * gnu-smalltalk-gdbm for GDBM.star and gdbm.so
 * gnu-smalltalk-postgresql for DBD-PostgreSQL.star
 * gnu-smalltalk-mysql for DBD-MySQL.star
 * gnu-smalltalk-zlib?

There are some subtles differences here on how those packages would be
handled, because for instance GTK.star is architecture dependent[1],
while usually .star files are not. And some .star files directly load
external libraries, e.g. NCurses.star loads libncurses.so and
DBD-PostgreSQL.star loads libpq.so[2]. Besides, we'll need to be
carefull to make sure package.xml dependencies are captured in Debian
packages[4].

I don't know whether some other .star packages should have their own
Debian package, e.g. glorp, sunit.

To compare with Debian Java packages of libraries using native code[3]:
native code is stored in an extra package, so that for example
libwhatever-java package depends on libwhatever-jni. For .star packages
that rely on an internal library (i.e. not NCurses.star nor
DBD-PostgreSQL.star) that might be the way to go.

What's your opinion on this?

Thanks,

Thomas

[1] no problem with multiarch anymore: .star files are searched for 
    in the smalltalk image dir too
[2] self note: 'replace this with sonames'
[3] see for example http://packages.debian.org/sid/libglib-java
[4] maybe we'll need to write a debhelper program for this