I'm starting my IRAF packaging adventure again (I spoke with the maintainer of the current binary-only "contrib" IRAF package, Zed Pobre, a year or two ago [CC'd, Hi Zed, I'm back], and the situation seems fairly unchanged -- it is "contrib" because he was not able to build it from source, not because that is forbidden by licensing. I may have a bit more insight into the upstream source providers, so I'm going to see if I can handle it now.) I've also mentioned this to Mike Fitzpatrick who's pretty much the upstream maintainer at NOAO, and he at least seems sanguine about it. ;-)
One problem is that there is no source .tgz file for IRAF, there are instead three, and they are versioned by location, not name (i.e. you will find same-named archives in each of the version directories on the FTP server, but they are different files -- I'm building IRAF 2.12, BTW): hs.pcix.gen.gz (Host System Interface Sources) is.port.gen.gz (IRAF Core Sources) ns.port.gen.gz (NOAO Package Sources) (yes, they're actually tar.gz format) To make matters worse, if and when I get around to building for platforms other than i386, I may need variants of the hs.*.gen.gz package as well. I propose to resolve this by repacking my unpacked sources, into a more-conformant source .tgz format. Is that what is meant by a "Debian Native Package"? To add to the mayhem, there is a note which states that an NSF policy change has indeed made some important components of IRAF non-free, so I infer that a free version will need to remove the affected components. But I intend to attack that as a separate problem from the initial build. It does underscore the need for a cleaned-up new distribution package, though. Part of the reason for this mess, of course, is that the source package I propose to make will be on the order of 17 MB in size, which, historically at least, has been considered inconveniently large for internet downloading. Can I just tell dh_make to make this corrected archive, using the native option? Or do I need to be more clever than that? i.e.: # Unpack the upstream sources mkdir iraf-2.12 cd iraf-2.12 tar zxf ../hs.pcix.gen.gz tar zxf ../is.port.gen.gz mkdir noao cd noao tar zxf ../../ns.port.gen.gz # '*' # Run dh_make with "native" option: dh_make --email [EMAIL PROTECTED] --native --single # Edit the files in debian/, set up debian/rules to do the build properly # Then just run the buildpackage script dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sgpg Have I got that right? Or should I be manually creating the new source .tgz distribution at the point labeled '*' above? Advice, hand-holding, and general moral support much appreciated. ;-) Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]