On Wed, 8 Sep 1999, Ben Collins wrote: > On Wed, Sep 08, 1999 at 02:48:43PM +0200, Fernando Sanchez wrote: > > Hello, > > I have found that a package for which I am not the maintainer > > (ocaml) is not being built for i386 architecture in its latest versions (it > > is ok for powerpc and alpha). I have tried to compile it for i386 and there > > have been no problems, so I'm thinking about uploading it as binary-only as > > it is explained in Debian Developer's Reference. Questions: > > > > - is there any problem in doing this? Should I report it to someone, or is > > it ok if I just upload ocaml_2.02-5_i386.deb as usual? > > > > - resulting package is not totally "lintian-clean": it complains about a > > lacking man page and man pages placement not being FHS compliant. Should I > > patch it and report it as a bug, wait for the maintainer upload which > > corrects the bug and port it then to i386 architecture, or is it better if I > > solve the problem now and upload it as binary-only? > > If you port a package (ie, simply compile it for an architecture which it > is not compiled for) you can upload it without problems given a few guide > lines: There is an i386 build demon which should automatically pick up those packages, but ocaml is in non-free, I think the build demons take packages only from main? The maintainer released it a source and PowerPC deb, the alpha deb was not announce on debian-devel-changes it seems, m68k and i386 lag behind a bit. I dont know if the alpha demon built the package, but I think that the m68k demon only build packages from main, contrib, non-free and non-US are usually built "by-hand", ie not automatically.
I dont think the build demons will pick up non-main packages in the near future, but maybe we could have a quinn-diff running on contrib and the non-* directories, so that we at least know when something is not up to date. And somebody could step forward and build packages which were released as source and non-i386.debs? Or is it the responsibility of the source maintainer to find somebody to build it for other arches? Ciao, Christian.
