Rapicorn packaging recommendations

[Tim Janik]

Hi Christian,

today I saw:
http://www.deb-multimedia.org/lurker/message/20141029.154045.86ade737.en.html

First, thanks for packaging Rapicorn for Debian.

Now I do have a couple comments about the packaging:
* aidacc is an *IDL* compiler (interface definition language), not "ild" ;-)
* Currently aidacc is a build tool under heavy development, used just for rapicorn and beast. It's not clear if separating it from Rapicorn will ever make sense, because of that it might even make sense to rename it "rapididl" in the future.
* As a build tool, it's not making too much sense to have a separate package for it now, and certainly not to bundle it with all other binaries built by Rapicorn.
* rapidrun is actually a proper Rapicorn program that might be needed/executed by the library in the future.
* And here's a heads up that rapicorn-zintern will be renamed to rapidres in the next release: https://testbit.eu/pub/docs/rapicorn/latest/rapidres.1.html
* It's not unlikely that the Rapicorn python module will become a hard dependency to operate the Rapicorn library in the future.

I don't know if there's any "standard" way for upstream to make packaging recommendations for downstream (Debian), so I'll outline my thoughts here.

If you can point me to any means to do this more officially that's highly appreciated. (Debian bug tracker? does upstream regularly read README of releases? NEWS? anything else?)

Fine grained packaging recommendation for Rapicorn:
* librapicornXXXX - include librapicornXXXX.so and rapidrun binary
* librapicornXXXX-dbg - seperated debug symbols (objcopy --only-keep-debug) which make up 80%+ of the library size.
* librapicornXXXX-dev - include headers, aidacc, rapicorn-zintern (to be renamed to rapidres in the next release), i.e. the development tools and materials
* librapicornXXXX-doc - everything installed under share/doc/rapicornXXXX and share/man/
* librapicornXXXX-python - everything from lib/python2.7/site-packages/RapicornXXXX

To be more future proof and make packaging simpler, more coarse packaging would be better though:
* librapicornXXXX - include the above librapicornXXXX + librapicornXXXX-python + librapicornXXXX-doc
* librapicornXXXX-dev - include the above librapicornXXXX-dev + librapicornXXXX-dbg

I'd be happy to hear if there're any Debian packaging constraints, policy violations or similar that need to be considered as well.

--
Yours sincerely,
Tim Janik

https://testbit.eu/timj/
Free software author and speaker.

[mobiphil]

hi, not related:

wanted to give a try to your lib...

./configure is missing from git, tried with autoconf etc.. but lots of errors... would be lovely if you post on your git.readme the propper way you would configure (now you provide instructions with ./confugire)

thanks

[Tim Janik]

Hello mobiphil,

I'd generally recommend release tarballs for testing:
https://testbit.eu/pub/dists/rapicorn/

For those, the README instructions are uptodate and a simple configure && make all install will work.
It's been tested on 32bit and 64bit of recent Ubuntu versions.

See also the roadmap for what is still missing: https://testbit.eu/wiki/Rapicorn_Task_List#Roadmap

Once we're a bit further with the theming functionality, we'll provide more tutorials on how to put Rapicorn to good use.

> thanks