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Custom Debian Distributions
Chapter 8 - The web sentinel


8.1 Existing and prospective packages

The result of the stuff described in this paragraph could for example be viewed at the tasks page of the Debian-Med project. If you want stuff like that just follow the instructions below.

If a Custom Debian Distribution should be presented one of the first questions is, what packages are available. The next question might be which packages are on the todo list for inclusion in Debian to make Debian even more attractive for people the CDD is targeting at. Both questions can be answered if you point people to the dynamically created tasks page. The page is rebuild daily to stay up to date according to recent developments of the CDD. The build process works as follows:

The rationale behind this is to provide as much as possible information about packages that might be interesting for the target user of the CDD. Moreover the page can provide useful information for developers about things that might be a useful help for the project to work down the todo list and build Debian packages for software that is not yet included in Debian. To get the todo list builded it is necessary to add some additional information to the task files which are the main database of information for the CDD. The information is following the RFC822 syntax as all Debian control files do and is kept quite simple:

Depends / Recommends / Suggests

Even if there is no Debian package available for the moment the names of prospective packages are given as if they would exists. The rationale behind is that once such a package might exist the source of the meta package does not have to be changed and will work out of the box after rebuilding.

Ignore

The Ignore key should be the favourite way to use for specifying prospective packages in case the packages should be evaluated once it appears in the Debian package pool. If "Depends", "Recommends" or "Suggests" are used for not yet existing packages they will be turned into the list of Suggests of the meta package and thus might be possible to become installed on a users machine if the user decides to install all suggested packages. If some evaluation should be done first the "Ignore" tag is your friend.

Homepage

This is the URL to the software that should be packaged.

WNPP

In case there might be a WNPP bug filed for this software the bug number is given here. This helps to keep track of the ongoing effort to package the software.

Responsible

In case some developer claimed to care for the software (perhaps by issuing the WNPP bug report) the e-mail address of this developer is given here to enable an easy way to contact this person.

License

Debian cares always about the license. This information about prospective packages should be easily available.

Pkg-URL

In some cases there are unofficial packages for some software which are prepared by a third party. It helps our users if they could install such a package and thus the URL to it might be a helpful hint. This is also true for developers because they might have a look at this packaging before they start from scratch. Often packages are available at mentors.debian.net and prepared by people who do not yet have an official Debian maintainer status and thus are not able to upload packages to the Debian mirror. The packages at mentors are waiting for sponsoring of an official Debian maintainer and if such a package shows up in the CDD tasks list it might speed up the inclusion into official Debian distribution.

Pkg-Description

This tag should give reasonable information about the software as it normally is done in debian/control files. It can be either a copy of the description of the WNPP bug or could be used to file a WNPP bug and thus helps to simplify the packaging work.


8.2 Debian Description Translation Project

The Debian Description Translation Project (see Documentation packages, Section 6.1.4) provides users of non English languages with information about Debian packages. The sense of supporting especially the translations of descriptions which are in the focus of a CDD is to make the CDD even more usable for our target users. Moreover people interested in the special field of the CDD are most probably able to provide good translations if it comes to texts that are specific to their field of knowledge. Thus there is a web page automatically created that parses the tasks packages for package names and verifies the translation status of the package descriptions.

Finally the DDTP descriptions can be used to create internationalised pages of existing packages which might help users with insufficient skills in English to easily find their software of interest.


8.3 Bugs overview

The goal of a CDD is to support their user as best as possible. So a feature to have a quick overview about all packages in our focus might be helpful. This is solved by the bugs overview page. To create this page the tasks files are parsed for the listed dependencies. Then the Debian Bug Tracking System is consulted about known bugs of these packages. All bugs are listed and marked with different colours according to their severity. So the developers can easily check this page in case they plan to fix some bugs that are relevant for the CDD.


8.4 SVN overview

This page gives a recent overview about the current development activities of the CDD developers.


8.5 Quality assurance report

The Debian Quality Assurance group does a decent job in watching the status o f Debian packages. If a package features a valid debian/watch the tool uscan is able to verify the upstream source location for newer versions. The QA report page reports issues about the packages that are relevant for a CDD.


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Custom Debian Distributions

4 July 2008

Andreas Tille tille@debian.org