Unstable package list

[Nick Moffitt]

16May1999 04:41PM (-0500) From [davidw@master.debian.org] davidw
[David Welton]
> >         Who's in charge of that?  Is there some way of remotely
> > generating one?
> 
> 1. They know about the problem, and 2. I don't know if there's any way
> to do that...

        That's cool.  I figured that since it was the _unstable_
track, I didn't have much right to complain publically.  Thanks for
letting me know.

        The packages file is really just a dpkg -I of all the
packages, right?  I mean, I could concievably grab packages and just
concatenate all the output of dpkg to one big file, yes?

> >         But moving on to Bay Area Debian, how difficult would it be
> > to do a bit of a tutorial on building deb packages?
> 
> Joey's the expert - having built the tools that the rest of us use to
> automate this process:-)

        Aha!  I understand that getting into the intricacies of the
policy guidlines would be far too elaborate, but suppose we just went
over the technical aspects.  I've got a nice little package from
UCBerkeley that isn't in the packages list.  It's called nwrite, and
it's a replacement for write.  

        So we could go over how to build it as a package (it's just an
executable, a man page, and a config file, really), and then maybe go
into use of /etc/alternatives and so forth.  I realize that the
alternatives system requires a bit more coordination, so perhaps that
might be too elaborate as well.

-- 
"The software is intended to be as unobtrusive, unintrusive and
unconstraining as possible.  In software as elsewhere, good
engineering is whatever gets the job done without calling attention to
itself." -- Cynbe ru Taren, on Citadel (http://zork.net/cit/citadel.txt)