Hello List :) Firstly, let me say that it is fantastic to see so many people sign-up for the CrunchBangers Launchpad team. Personally I am really quite excited about using Launchpad to open-up the development of CrunchBang and I am hoping to see good things come of it. Anyhow, I am sure you are dying to know what this message is all about, so...
...as some of you may have seen, it was recently highlighted on the forums that there is a "flawed approach" to packaging the data files needed to pull off some of the CrunchBang customisations. The post was accurate, if not a little dramatic, and I would like for this to be resolved. It is currently my top priority as it also concerns the upgrade process, which is currently in a rather poor state. If you are not familiar with forum post, it can be read at: http://tinyurl.com/b83lve I have spent the majority if the last few days looking into this, identifying the packages which will need modifying and trying to come up with a plan to resolve these issues. Technically, modifying the packages is not a problem and I have begun work on this already. The main issue, as I see it, concerns the naming conventions/versioning for these modified packages and how best to provide them in tandem with the existing packages provided by the Ubuntu repositories. My first thought was to simply rename the modified packages and include a "Replaces" stanza with the package's control file. It then occurred to me that this technique may/would cause problems with deep dependencies. So, I scrapped that idea and moved to the idea of modifying the package version numbers. The normal way to modify version numbers would be to take an existing version number, such as: foopackage (1.0.1-1ubuntu1) and change it to something like: foopackage (1.0.1-1ubuntu1-2crunchbang1) The above change would give the modified CrunchBang package a higher version number and so it would happily replace/co-exist with the original Ubuntu package. The problem with this is that as soon as the Ubuntu package is updated to 1.0.2, it will replace the CrunchBang package. The could be undesirable. Which leads me to the idea of prefixing the version numbers; using the same example above, I propose the idea of prefixing version numbers with 666, which would mean this: foopackage (1.0.1-1ubuntu1) would become: foopackage (666.1.0.1-1ubuntu1-2crunchbang1) This should fix the problem of having to worry about modified packages being replaced. It would also mean: * any existing Ubuntu packages which have been modified for CrunchBang are very easily identifiable -- as they would have mark of beast :D * the packages would retain their original Ubuntu version numbers sandwiched between the CrunchBang prefix and revisions. If this plan meets with approval from this list and I have not missed any potential downfalls/flaws, I also suggest setting up a watch-list for any devil packages, meaning that the maintainers of the modified CrunchBang packages will be notified when new versions of the original Ubuntu packages are released. Enough from me, sorry for the length of the message, but I figure this is something which needs a thorough explanation. So, does anyone have any thoughts? Have I missed anything obvious? -- Philip _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~crunchbangers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~crunchbangers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
