Well, but the Debian/Ubuntu maintainers will just package it if they want it in their repositories. Not like that’'s the hard part…
Matt,
Im glad to see you are on board with making a debian package. Ive lots of experience in that area if you need some help. I even know a few official debian developers, so it might be possible to get it included in the official debian repository (and thus Ubuntu).
slush,
Excellent… I can guarantee that you’‘ll be hearing from me. So far, I have the initial package working with all the standard control stuff. I even do some nifty tricks like put the configuration data in /etc/wildfire and then use a symlink. It was all pretty easy given that I’'ve never used Ubuntu or Debian before this weekend. Main things to do:
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Write the postinst, etc scripts so that config and truststore/keystore files don’'t get overwritten on upgrades.
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A better wildfire.sh script that does things like warn about Java versions, finds dependencies better, records running PID, etc.
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Some form of init.d integration that’'s easy for users.
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Find a Debian/Ubuntu sponsor to get us into multiverse. I believe that multiverse is the repository we want to be in, given that we depend on non-free software (Sun’'s JVM)?
Thanks,
Matt
Matt,
Have you read the Debian Developer’'s Reference? Its not a quick read, by any means, but its worth keeping a link handy too at least. It explains a lot about the policys and procedures for making Debian packages. Ubuntu is not Debian, but they work in simalar ways. Besides, if you can get your package in Debian, getting it into Ubuntu is easy, but not the other way around (Debian would be a HUGE target to reach people with).
Debian packages have the notion of config files. Listing the config files (and truststore/keystore, etc) means if the user modified these things, they will not get overwritten on upgrades, but if they have not changed them, they will in most situations.
I know its not ideal to have a different startup script for each Linux distro supported, but I think its worth it. Debian has the start-stop-deamon command which makes starting and stopping services very easy. Be sure your startup script uses that, and be sure your preinst/postinst script uses update-rc.d to install the startup script (too many packages break that rule, its anoying).
You will likely need to get into Debian contrib as sun-java5-jre is still in non-free. But that might change in the future, there has been a lot of talk about Sun’'s new license for Java. It wont really have a big impact on you one way or the other though. To get in Debian, you will want to read this: http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint . I would love to help out with this. Ive been looking for an excuse to get involved more in Debian anyway.
As for Ubuntu, I dont know their politics as well. But I know you want to talk to their IM team: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Teams/IM , and perhaps their Java team: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Teams/Java . I think you first need to get included in Universe, and then be considered for inclusion in Multiverse. From what Ive read, though, its easier to get in if you are already in Debian proper.
Ok, I think Ive gotten far enough off topic already