Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Debderive

[Sam Geeraerts]

Stayvoid wrote:
 > 1. "This software intends to make it easy to create a package
> repository that's derived from Debian." [1]
> Can't we just use reprepro for this purpose? AFAIK there is no
> difference between Debian and GNS Parkes.

We could. But we want to update the repo in a periodic (e.g. daily) cron 
job, which would need a bit of scripting anyway. So I put in a bit more 
effort so that we could have a simpler configuration (imo) than 
reprepro's and not have to worry about it's many options. The 
effort/simplicity balance didn't turn out completely as I'd hoped, but 
I'm pretty happy with it.

A stable Parkes will have some packages excluded, some patched and some 
added. If there was to be no difference between gNewSense and Debian 
than there was no need for gNewSense and we could just put Debian on the 
list of free distros.

> 2. I'm new to Python and to the development itself. I just don't know
> what is the best way to start. I don't have enough experience to see
> missing features etc. What should I read to understand how everything
> works? It will be nice if you tell me about some missing features and
> a way to solve them. For example: foo feature is missing. Go read bar
> to make it work.

Since it's an abstraction of reprepro it's good to know the basics of 
that. Read the man page about conf/distributions and conf/updates. Look 
in debderive.py for "_do" to see which commands it uses and read about 
those. If you want to try Debderiver out yourself it's good to have a 
local repo to test with. It's not necessary to get all of Debian, use 
debmirror to fill it with just a few packages (use [1] for inspiration).

Debderiver has a todo list [2]. I also just realized that there's no 
dependency checking in the script. It should at least check if reprepro 
is installed. A simple check to see if /usr/bin/reprepro exists would be 
a nice start.

Documentation (README, INSTALL, FAQ) also needs improving. A new and 
outside perspective like yours can be a great contribution. Patches for 
those files, or just questions about how to get it working are welcome. 
If those files don't make it clear (for someone who knows what a deb 
mirror looks like) how to use it without asking me, then it's a bug.

> 3. What is the best way to share my code? Should I use something like
> pastebin? Will it be ok to paste the code in a letter's body? Should I
> use something else (bzr)?

You could send a patch (produced with 'diff -Nru') to this mailing list. 
You could also put your Bazaar branch somewhere public and tell us about 
it. I don't think Savannah supports personal (i.e. linked to user 
instead of project) branches, but maybe you have your own hosting or you 
could use Launchpad.

> 4. Debderiver is licensed under the GNU GPL v3. Should I attach the
> license's text to every peace of code that I want to share? A line of
> code is a code. Is it really necessary to ship oneliners with the text
> of the license?

If you submit a patch without mentioning a license it's assumed to be 
under the same license(s) as the code you're patching. Some projects, 
like Linux, have a sign-off procedure [3]. You don't have to add the 
license to patches you contribute to gNewSense, but if you're paranoid 
about it, you can just say the name of the license (e.g. GPLv3) instead 
of the whole license text.

If you have any further questions, please ask.

[1] 
http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/gnewsense/metad/annotate/head:/cron.daily/02_bpo-sync
[2] http://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/lh/gnewsense/debderiver/annotate/head:/TODO
[3] http://www.elinux.org/Legal_Issues