Misc Developer News (#40)

To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org

Subject: Misc Developer News (#40)

From: Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>

Date: Sat, 02 Jan 2016 17:24:02 +0800

Message-id: <[🔎] 1451726642.2731.36.camel@debian.org>

Mail-followup-to: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

The news are collected on https://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject. In this issue: + new Debian packaging tool: cme with dpkg plugin + Empty binary packages + Improving Large File Support (LFS) + bts-link now watches over bug reports forwarded to upstream Allura trackers on sf.net + Automatic debug symbols (dbgsym) packages + Please plan for Debian stretch new Debian packaging tool: cme with dpkg plugin ----------------------------------------------- cme and its dpkg plugin provide a new tool to help maintain Debian packages. cme provides a GUI to edit package files and a CLI to modify or check these files. Editing or modifying package file with cme automatically upgrades package files to newer syntax. cme stands "config model editor" and is a generic tool to edit configuration files. cme requires plugins to work. The dpkg plugin (aka model) enables cme to work on Debian package files. Currently, it supports control, copyright (DEP-5), patches (DEP-3) and some other files like compat. For installation and usage instructions, please read Managing Debian packages wiki page[1] -- Dominique Dumont [1] https://github.com/dod38fr/config-model/wiki/Managing-Debian-packages-with-cme Empty binary packages --------------------- Empty binary packages will now[2] be automatically rejected by ftp-master. This can be overridden however. The archive software (dak) uses the lintian empty-binary-package tag to determine which binary packages are empty. -- Paul Wise [2] https://lists.debian.org/87si9qyqzb.fsf@gkar.ganneff.de Improving Large File Support (LFS) ---------------------------------- Our Large File Support[3] on some 32-bit architectures is a bit poor, and this has been going on for a while now. Please consider enabling LFS on packages containing programs at any point, and on shared library packages whenever there's a SONAME bump. Even if neither of these are supposed to handle large files, they might still fail if they need to operate on files with large metadata values (like inode numbers). See this mail[4] and the above lintian tag for more details. -- Guillem Jover [3] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/binary-file-built-without-LFS-support.html [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/07/msg00171.html bts-link now watches over bug reports forwarded to upstream Allura trackers on sf.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- bts-link[5] has recently been improved to add support for Allura trackers that are used on Sourceforge. If Debian bug reports have a Forwarded-To link pointing to URL patterns of the form http://sourceforge.net/p/PROJNAME/TRACKERNAME/123456/, bts-link is now able to analyse the remote bug status to detect changes and notify. Allura support is not limited to sf.net, so adding other Allura trackers may be requested if needed. -- Olivier Berger [5] http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/ Automatic debug symbols (dbgsym) packages ----------------------------------------- Since debhelper 9.20151219, debug symbols (dbgsym) packages are produced by default[6] without *any* work/effort needed from maintainers. They are available from a separate mirror[7] and snapshot.debian.org[8]. We currently only have an unstable and experimental suite for them right now. Testing (incl. the next stable release) needs a bit more work. If you are concerned with extra upload speed/cost, please consider using "source-only" (or arch:all+source) uploads. These will be even faster/cheaper for you and will leave the heavy lifting to buildds. -- Niels Thykier [6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/12/msg00262.html [7] http://debug.mirrors.debian.org/debian-debug/ [8] http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-debug/ Please plan for Debian stretch ----------------------- In the 4th quarter of 2016, we will freeze Debian stretch. If you are hoping to do any larger changes for stretch, please consider starting on them now[9]. This also includes features that need to be in APT/dpkg/etc in stretch, so we can start using them for buster. -- Niels Thykier [9] https://nthykier.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/debian-please-plan-for-stretch/ -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise