[Kolab-devel] Announcing some blog posts for building packages for Debian on OBS

[Paul Boddie]

On Tuesday 29. October 2013 10.50.08 Torsten Grote wrote:
> On Monday 28 October 2013 20:23:44 Paul Boddie wrote:
> > I was wondering which project we should be targeting. I see there are
> > "3.1" and "Development" projects, and when I tried to build the
> > "Development" packages myself there seemed to be some kind of
> > fundamental (non-packaging- related) build issue, whereas the "3.1"
> > packages didn't exhibit the same problems.
> 
> Did you use the obc build command for building? I had no issues using it
> with the development branch according to Timotheus step by step guide.

I initially decided to do package builds the traditional way using pbuilder, 
but to satisfy pbuilder there are apparently various tricks required to 
satisfy build dependencies where these are not already in the repository. 
Although I think I figured that out, I then experienced other problems such as 
libkolabxml wanting to install a cmake-related file that didn't exist, and I 
think this then affected libkolab because the build failed with the following 
error:

No rule to make target `kolabxml-NOTFOUND', needed by `libkolab.so.0.5'.

So, I've come to the conclusion that if the osc-based approach works for 
Timotheus, then it must work for me unless there are distribution version or 
architecture issues. I imagine that osc must be clever enough to build 
packages in the right order and to retain newly packaged dependencies.

> > If we're fine-tuning the packaging is it best to target "3.1" in order to
> > not  have to deal with two different variables at the same time, or
> > should it be safe to target the "Development" stuff? Also, where do the
> > "Updates" come into this?
> 
> I don't know. Timotheus said branch of development. But I also don't know
> how packages flow back into the Kolab 3.1 branch.

What concerned me was that the development stuff might be unstable code in 
itself, thus introducing non-packaging problems.

> > I also wondered whether the upstream (non-packaging-related) code should
> > be "good to go" and not needing to be patched.
> 
> It should be. If you have some patches here, attaching them to a bugzilla
> issue would be the first step.
> 
> This might also be interesting:
> 
>     http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Build_Service_Debian_builds

That's a useful reference, thanks. It isn't completely unlikely that a Debian 
package might change the upstream source, but I was obliged to use quilt when 
I did that for something I packaged, and so that's why I mentioned it here.

Thanks for the clarifications! I'll struggle on and see what I can manage to 
achieve.

Paul