Hello.
This is slightly off-topic, and I have not been on this mailinglist since this thread started. Nevertheless, I would like to express my support for changing the packaging practices. Over the last two weeks, I tried creating ports and packages for my project "dMagnetic". It was rather easy for the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports system. All that was needed there were some changes to some existing files, and my port was ready. FreeBSD was the easiest: Sourcecode URL, SHA256 sum and a short description was all that was needed. Now it is already part of the offical ports collection. Debian was quite more complicated, and the documentation on that topic was scattered all over the interwebs. Here I had to download the sources, rename the directories, rename the package, repackage, change some files, count the number of spaces at the beginning of a line... I did it, but it is rather frustrating for new developers. Please please help them! :) Thomas Dettbarn