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Where do Debian maintainers collect their institutional knowledge, these days? In the past it felt like DSCs uploaded to the FTP queues were the equivalent of
by gorgoiler 6y ago
Where do Debian maintainers collect their institutional knowledge, these days?
In the past it felt like DSCs uploaded to the FTP queues were the equivalent of committing code on a software project. Are they all in one git repository now, that can be tracked outside the project?
Nothing beats being able to read the code for learning how a system actually works.
- pabs3 6y agoSome packages use git for maintaining the packaging, but the Debian archive and build servers are still based on Debian source packages (.dsc files).
- pabs3 6y agoDebian maintainers collect their institutional knowledge from participating in package maintenance, following Debian mailing lists and other communication forums etc.
- debiandev 6y agoDD here. apt-get install maint-guide ...and then read: file:///usr/share/developers-reference/index.html file:///usr/share/doc/maint-guide/html/index.en.html Also look at existing packages and talk to DDs. Avoid random wikis. I worked on many deployment systems and reading these guides made me a better engineer overall.
- gorgoiler 6y agoThanks! The problem I saw from parent and other posts was that there’s two sets of information you need to build a package: (1) the sources and debian patches, where the last public release of these is available from packages.debian.org (2) knowing the right command to run to build the package. In the old days you could guarantee everything would build via dpkg-buildpackage though you’d need to know to add -r fakeroot. It sounded like nowadays it’s more complicated than that?
- j1elo 6y agoThe process itself seems to be very similar if not exactly the same. The problem is not that, but the way to get there, and how the information is structured and presented, especially if you start from having no idea, or if you want to build your debian/ files from a blank slate and being able to read in a centralized resource about definitions of every line you add (which I think should be possible to do, for any system in general).