Packing, unpacking, and modifying (as per §4.14)
================================================
1. Generate the fully patched source, in a form ready for editing, that
would be built to create Debian packages.
This step does not need any special attention. The standard invocation
of "dpkg-source -x" does exactly what is needed.
2. Modify the source and save those modifications so that they will be
applied when building the package.
== AND ==
3. Remove source modifications that are currently being applied when
building the package.
There is no standard procedure for this package. Please note that:
- quilt seems to be the default tool for this kind of work.
- git-buildpackage (gbp) might not work as expected, so I refrained
from trying it for this task. See below.
So far, issues reported against the project have been resolved quickly
enough to avoid scenarios that usually need the d/patches/ directory.
4. Generate a *.orig.tar.gz from the git repository, e.g., upgrade the
Debian source package to a new upstream version.
Easy way:
use the provided orig-tars, e.g., 'telegram-purple_1.2.6.orig.tar.gz'
Hard way (the procedure used to create these files):
$ git clone --recursive --branch debian-master \
https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple.git
$ cd telegram-purple
...$ make dist
The output should look like this:
Refresh commit.h
./gen-origtar
mv -f bin/result.tar.gz telegram-purple_deb-v1.2.4-2-161-gb5272d4.orig.tar.gz
The following approaches do NOT work:
- Github's "download source tar", as this leaves out submodules.
- git-buildpackage (gpb). No support for submodules-within-submodules.
The file README.md of the project contains some hints about how to
build packages, so here's a cheat sheet:
- Just build a *.deb, ideal for local use:
fakeroot ./debian/rules binary
- Build the package for analysis, e.g. lintian:
dpkg-buildpackage
- Only produce a *.dsc and *.debian.tar.xz file:
( cd .. && dpkg-source -b telegram-purple )
- Run pbuilder (needs the previous step):
( cd .. && sudo pbuilder --build telegram-purple_*.dsc )
Package name
============
At the time of writing (2016-01-03), the Debian repository contained
the following libpurple-backends:
- pidgin-encryption
- pidgin-latex
- pidgin-otr
- pidgin-plugin-pack
- pidgin-privacy-please
So following that tradition, this package would be called "pidgin-telegram".
However, this would have a lot of disadvantages:
- This is a frontend-agnostic backend that works with Adium, pidgin,
and Finch. We hope that it works nicely with all other frontends, too.
Calling it "pidgin-something" would be highly misleading.
- All error messages and their translations would need to be adapted
- paths would need to change that aren't configurable
- some users are expecting the name to be "telegram-purple"
(at least initially)
Overall, we consider this a needlessly confusing convention, and
intentionally break with it.
Packaging libtgl separately (as per §4.13)
==========================================
No.
So far, ABI-compatibility was broken between virtually every other
commit to libtgl, and the library is still under development. The
latest "stable" release is heavily outdated and can no longer be used
productively (missing features, known breaking bugs, etc.), so if we were to
package tgl we would need to repackage it constantly, with no defined
concept of version, soname, or anything reliable. No other program
(*including* tg-cli) can be expected to use the same version of libtgl
as telegram-purple does. (This might happen every now and then, but
that would be random chance. Finally, it's highly unlikely that someone
installs and uses both telegram-purple and tg-cli.)
Packaging "tl-parser" or the intermediate "generate" program is also a
bad idea: One *could* do that, but it's only useful for libtgl. So
there is a significant lack of users.
Note that tl-parser is a relatively (in comparison to the rest of
libtgl) stable, portable application (not library). The output format
hasn't changed in a over a year. If you believe that these six files
will be used by a lot of people, I'll be happy to package tl-parser for
you. However, please note that this would require at least two
packages: tl-parser (binary), tl-parser-dev (headers), and possibly
libtl-parser (common object files).
In short: there's no set of component that could be packaged in a more
clever way.
About this document
===================
This is not written in Markdown. All formatting is in the hope of
making it easy to read.
