You are here: / home / 2007 / 03 / 05

Mon, 05 Mar 2007

Back from Chemnitz

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage are over and I'm back home. Again it was an outstanding event. Starting from the overall organisation to the social event (and their quiz) to the catering... I'm still stuffed with the buffet of the social event :)

The first thing in the morning I did a workshop about Debian package building. It was very well visited; only two seats were left empty. The visitors were very good; understood most very fast and corrected me a couple of times, when I did copy'n paste mistakes. It was fun to do that, and I got good feedback.

BTW: If you need a small example to show someone how to create a Debian package, you might want to take a look an gnujump. The templates created by dh_make work nearly out of the box (so you can concentrate on explaining what is done, instead of fixing stuff to get it working), while the resulting package has still place for improvements (.menu and .desktop files; splitting the package into a arch dependent and an arch independent; etc.) And most important: It is compiles quite fast, while you still have something to show, so your visitors will see, that you indeed did something.

Talking about the feedback I got after the workshop: One guy asked me about a way to check for conflicting packages, and we all wondered, that there's nothing scripted available, yet. So I promised to hack something together to at least check for conflicting files. The result is available at conflict finder (and later an svn.schmehl.info, as soon as I find out how to setup webdav/svn to allow read access to some repositories and not others).

To check for packages your package should conflict with, you need to first build your package (or we won't know which files are in your package) and give the path to the resulting .deb as the first parameter to the script. If you have a Contents-foo.gz file somewhere on your hard disc, you can specify the path to that file as the second parameter (if you use apt-file or have a local mirror, it'll try to find it; if everything fails the script will try to download one).

Then the script will check for each file of your Debian-Package if there is any other package having the same file. Sounds cool, but is damn slow; the repeated zgrep over the Contents-File is quite time consuming. For a quite small package (xdialog) it took nearly 15 minutes to complete. Wow, when I hacked it together, I wouldn't have thought it would be that slow.

As far as I know Alexander Wirt is already working on an improved version using some kind of database (and perl).

postet at 18:40 into [Debian/events] permanent link


About

Alexander Tolimar Reichle-Schmehl lives in Tuttlingen / Germany. He works as IT manager (specialized on Unix and SAN/Storage) for an international automotive supplier.

Links