Pkg-deepin work progress report, December 2017

[Boyuan Yang]

Dear pkg-deepin members, mentors and debian-chinese-gb list members,

Happy new year to you all and this is a brief report about packaging progress
in pkg-deepin team as of December 2017. As always, you may find the packaging
progress in the dependency graph hosted on Alioth [1]... or the brand new
platform, Salsa! [7]

## What are we doing?

Pkg-deepin team mainly focuses on introducing Deepin Software into Debian
"upstream" so that they can be made available to all Debian derivatives w/o
bothering flatpak/snappy/3rdparty ppa/etc. Our final goal is to push DDE
(Deepin Desktop Enviornment) into Debian.

## Starting migration from Alioth to Salsa

With recent announcement of Debian Salsa (Debian GitLab) service as Debian
Alioth's replacement [2], we have established the corresponding team on Salsa,
namely pkg-deepin-team [3]. All existing and portential contributors are
encouraged to join our team for better cooperation in the future.

The fate of pkg-deepin-devel maillist [4] is yet to be determined. My current
thought is to merge announcements into debian-chinese-gb list and track commit
/ upload / bug report information with facilities provided by tracker.debian.org.
As for development communication, an issue tracker on Salsa (e.g., [5]) might be
enough. I'd like to wait for several extra weeks and see what other teams are
going to do.

## Recent progress

* Regular updates to low-level libraries, including libdtk* & dde-qt-dbus-factory

* A bunch of Qt-based Deepin applications made there way into Debian, including:
+ deepin-shortcut-viewer
+ dde-calendar
+ deepin-picker
+ deepin-calculator

* And some basic libraries:
+ qtdbusextended

* Pkg-deepin team adopted one package:
+ zssh, needed by future deepin-terminal

* Packages now in NEW:
+ papirus-icon-theme
+ deepin-image-viewer

* Package deepin-gettext-tools got ACCEPTED into stretch-backports.

## Blockers and difficulties

No one is working on Golang part recently. However, the downside of the lack of
Golang daemons have emerged. For example, dde-calendar will attempt toinvoke
some IPC via D-Bus with (non-existent) dde-daemon to retrieve extra information
about lunar calendar. We are in need of volunteers familiar with golang and
anyone interested will be warmly encouraged to join pkg-deepin team.

Deepin applications also need Deepin's Qt5 platform plugin for featured functions
like window semi-transparency, window blurring, non-rectangle window shaping,
window decoration hijacking and so on. The lack of plugin will leaks to ugly
UI and even program crashing (e.g., deepin-picker). Packaging of these plugins
(including dde-qt5integration and deepin-qt5dxcb-plugin) is our next goal.

We are still in lack of manpower. If there's anyone interested in packaging
Deepin Software, please consider joining pkg-deepin team [3][6] and work with us.
Your help would be very much appreciated.

Regards,
Boyuan Yang

[1] https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-deepin/pkg-deepin.git/plain/depgraph/pkg-deepin-dep.svg
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/12/msg00003.html
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-deepin-team/
[4] https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-deepin-devel/
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-deepin-team/progress-tracker/issues
[6] https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-deepin/
[7] https://salsa.debian.org/pkg-deepin-team/progress-tracker/raw/master/depgraph/pkg-deepin-dep.svg