Re: [Banshee-List] Remuco 0.8 release announcement

[Oben Sonne <obensonne googlemail com>]

2009/3/26 Chow Loong Jin <hyperair gmail com>:
> On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 11:15 +0100, Oben Sonne wrote:
>> 2009/3/26 Chow Loong Jin <hyperair gmail com>:
>> > On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 01:31 +0100, Oben Sonne wrote:
>> >> Hey folks,
>> >>
>> >> I'm happy to announce release 0.8 of Remuco, a tool to remotely control
>> >> Banshee via Bluetooth or WiFi on J2ME cell phones.
>> >>
>> >> New features include enhanced playback control, cover art art support
>> >> and track progress display on the mobile device.
>> >>
>> >> See http://remuco.sourceforge.net/ for more information.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks.
>> >>
>> >> Oben
>> > Hey Oben,
>> >
>> > This looks like a wonderful application, and I'd like to package it for
>> > Debian and Ubuntu. I noticed your code is licensed under GPL-3, and
>> > that's all well and good, but you don't seem to have included the
>> > sources for the .jar files. As such, as per Debian Free Software
>> > Guidelines (DFSG) policy, these binaries have to be removed from the
>> > tarball (we generally upload DFSG clean tarballs instead of the pristine
>> > upstream tarballs in this case).
>> >
>> > However, unless I'm mistaken, remuco without the client is pretty
>> > useless. Could you perhaps include a tarball with the sources of
>> > this .jar file, and perhaps some sort of build system (Makefile?) to
>> > generate this .jar?
>> >
>> > Thanks.
>> > --
>> > Chow Loong Jin
>> >
>>
>> Hey Chow,
>>
>> sounds good, thanks for the contribution.
>>
>> You're right, without the client the whole system is useless. The
>> complete source code is available in an SVN repository:
>> https://remuco.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/remuco/tags/0.8.0/ . The
>> client binaries are built using ant - some instructions can be found
>> at the top of the file client/build.xml.
>>
>> Concerning the packaging guide lines, is a release specific SVN URL
>> sufficient or do you require an explicit source package?
>>
>> Oben
>
> It's possible to use SVN, but it's generally not advised, as the tarball
> needs to be generated by the Debian maintainer or uploader of the
> package (into Debian). Perhaps you could release a 0.8.0.1 tarball? I'm
> working on the python bits of this package at the moment.
>
> Another thing: What versions of python will this work on? Also, is the
> remuco module (base/module/remuco) supposed to be a public module or
> private module?
>
> Either way I think it should be okay if you release the sources (and
> build system) together with the tarball instead of the .jar file.
>
> Thanks.
> --
> Chow Loong Jin

Ok, I'll prepare such a package. Just thinking about whether to create
an extra source package or whether to include the source in the
current package (next to the binaries). In any case there should be a
package for end users (which might not use a debian system) which
contains the binaries of the client -- creating the binaries initially
requires a good piece of work which is not necessary if users just
want to deploy the client on their devices.

Concerning the Python module:
For now I would say it is a private module as it is only used by other
components (player adapters) within the remuco package. Further the
module's API may still evolve. From a long term perspective it might
be made public one day when it sounds reasonable to distribute player
adapters outside the remuco package, e.g as part of a media player.
What effects does this decision have on packaging?

Btw. if you have any recommendations concerning the build structure of
the package to make life easier for packagers, let me know it.

Maybe we should proceed this discussion private? I guess it is not
that interesting for most list members.

Oben