[GRASS5] GRASS in Debian

[Eric G. Miller]

On Fri, 25 Jan 2002 02:13:15 +0100, Markus Neteler <neteler at itc.it> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 09:45:37PM +0100, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > GRASS made the Weekly Debian News:
> > http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2002/4/
> > 
> > 	Help with Packaging GRASS. 
> > 
> > 	A [39]question came up asking about the status of packaging
> > 	GRASS. Federico Di Gregorio replied that he has [40]preliminary
> > 	packages ready which are full of packaging errors and generate a
> > 	single 25MB package. He asked for help with this effort; so if
> > 	somebody wants to help, please contact Federico.
> > 
> >   39. http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-0201/msg01702.html
> >   40. http://people.debian.org/~fog/
> > 
> > 
> > Maybe some developer should give Federico a hand. I don't know if he
> > know about this list.
> > 
> > One main argument to clarify the license of GRASS in 1999
> > was that clearly making a Free Software project will booth the
> > chances that it get packaged by distributions and attracts more developers.
> > Both seems to be happening, though it takes some time.
> 
> Looking at
>  http://people.debian.org/~fog/
> shows that he is obviously using beta8... That's a long time ago.
> Maybe he wants to try pre3 :-) ?

The major problem for debian in packaging GRASS is it's non-standard
build system.  Also, they have a lot of rules about where things
should go, etc.  Mostly, I think GRASS could fit the bill by first
changing the target install directory to be /usr/lib/grass5/ and
then a few install modifications for documentation (I'm not saying
we do this on the GRASS end...).  Mmm, maybe I'll look at that
Debian packaging manual again...

The oft talked about change in the build system will help packagers
alot as well (core shared libes, shared data files, core binaries,
extra libs/modules, documentation, etc...).

-- 
Eric G. Miller <egm2 at jps.net>