At the moment, all of the Debian-specific development and packaging
tools are scattered around various sections of the archive, some in
base (understandably!), some in devel, some in utils, and probably
others in other sections. But in some sense, they don't belong in any
of them (except for dpkg and a very few others in base): they are not
really "development libraries" needed for non-Debian developers to
compile software, they are not really general purpose utilities, and
so on.
I propose that the distribution should have a new "debian" section
which would be the place to put all of the Debian-specific packages,
at least in the source distribution. It would also be the location
for the packages needed only by developers in the binary
distribution. (Of course, "needed" here has a loose meaning.) This
would include:
dpkg*, apt (and any associated packages), debhelper, debstd,
devscripts, dupload, debian-keyring (?), and others.
This would help (a) new developers looking to find out which packages
they will need, (b) non-developers looking for certain Debian-specific
packages, and also those *not* looking for them, and (c) anyone who
wants to help Debian improve its system will have a simple place to
start!
Thoughts, anyone?
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian GNU/Linux Developer. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-*- Finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] for my PGP public key. -*-
