[Qgis-developer] New substvar for grass depending packages (e.g. upstream qgis package)

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

Hi d-gis and qgis folk

I'm going to release a new grass-dev package with a suitable
deb-substvars snippet. What i'm going to provide is a tiny
debian.substvars file that can be concatenated to <your-package>.substvars
before calling dh_gencontrol in order to introduce correct versioned 
dependencies on the available grass package.
The auxiliary var will be (as obviuous)

${grass:Depends}

Thanks to Stefan and Sergei from Tcl/Tk team to have pointed me in other
context this useful trick to manage inter-package dependency more easily
than a control template.

It could be considered to provide a debhelper-like method to 
merge grass dependency in all binary packages substvars too, just in
case. I see no reason for that ATM, the only reason to do that
would be getting the package names directly from debian/control
and completing the required files, for instance.

Currently it is more straightforward providing a simple

/usr/lib/grass64/debian.substvars

file in grass-dev. The goal of this var is declaring a binary interface
which can be used for interdependent packages, e.g. Qgis, Gdal plugin
I also would suggest Qgis folks providing the same kind of infrastructure
for possibly dependent packages, such as third-parties python plugins.

At the same time I will provide a debian.mak makefile snippet, with
Make vars which could be used to know where the package places
its own things, what is the grass version installed, what is its
debian interface etc.

Cheers.


-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine