A distribution packager's wishlist

[Tim Retout <tim retout co uk>]

Hi,

I've been looking at packaging hamster-applet for Debian. In terms of
making life easy for distribution packagers, the most important things
to solve are:

     1. Licensing. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547117
     2. Releasing consistent tarballs at a known download location.

The easiest way to achieve the latter is to use 'make distcheck' to
create the release, and to upload it through the usual GNOME channels to
ftp.gnome.org.  Using distcheck automatically checks that your tarball
will build, will produce a tarball that does not depend on the user
having the autotools installed, and will not ship the debian
directory.[0]

So please follow this guide, and distribution packagers will love you:
http://live.gnome.org/MaintainersCorner/Releasing

Thanks,

-- 
Tim Retout <tim retout co uk>

[0] You can keep the debian directory in SVN if you really want (for
users who build snapshot packages), but debian packagers will probably
have to repack any release tarballs if you ship it.  Plus, other
distributions probably don't want to waste their bandwidth on keeping
files around for Debian. :)