Hi there, first of all: I'd say hello to every volunteer working for debian - great project, nice system. Thank you all.
After using debian since 0.93R6 I just started to learn something more about creating packages and how to help the debian development. There are two things I'd like to add to the debian distribution, but before becoming a new maintainer, I'd practice the creation of packages. There are (at least) two more debs I'd like to see in debian: First is the PARI/GP library (a C library for number theory, to be short), it was included in the 1.<something> release of debian and is gone now -- anybody knows why? Second the html-documentation of the Standard Template Library. I saw this on WNPP an wrote an email to the maintainer, but did not get any answer. The status of my packaging: stl-doc is ok (lintian reports no errors), the library package of PARI/GP is somewhat harder: After reading all available documentation and building a simple "libhello"-package (you all know what's that for ;-), I started to build a debian-package from the pari sources. It works, I get 4 binary-debs from the source: the shared library, one static lib with header files, one static lib with debug info and, last not least, one deb containing the binary "gp" (some shell on top of libpari). libpari1_2.0.13.alpha-1_i386.deb libpari1-dev_2.0.13.alpha-1_i386.deb libpari1-dbg_2.0.13.alpha-1_i386.deb gp_2.0.13.alpha-1_i386.deb There is one big problem where I need help. First of all, there's some strange output of lintian: E: libpari1: shlib-with-non-pic-code usr/lib/libpari.so.2.0.13 I watched the complete build-process: _Every_ source file is compiled with gcc -c -O3 -fPIC -fexpensive-optimizations -malign-loops=2 \ -malign-jumps=2 -malign-functions=2 <sourcefile>.c the linkage is done with: gcc -shared -Wl,soname libpari.so.2 -o libpari.so.2.0.13 ... <object files> [ gcc is 2.7.2.3, taken from frozen ] When I do "objdump" on the .o-files (like lintian does it), there's no ".rel.text"-entry. When I link them together to get the library and do "objdump" on the library, I get: 3 .rel.text 00000068 0000b768 0000b768 0000b768 2**2 And (as you expected), lintian reports the error above. Any idea how this could happen? Anyway, I need some help with the licenses. Before posting many lines of copyrights, licenses and readmes here, I would like to ask if this is done better on debian-mentors? After all, I did not yet get through the "new maintainer"-registration and have some questions to those issues, too. My PGP-Key is signed by c't (german computer magazine), is this ok to "verify my real-life identity"? Thanks for listening and any help, Jonas -- "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name" (Linus Torvalds)