Someone asked me to try get some KDE package into Debian. I estimated that it would take me around 10 hours to get it into good enough shape before asking some Debian Developer to upload it for me. Here goes some rough estimates:
- hour 1: Find documentation on the subject; I got a few after a
quick search, which include the following:
- Ubuntu Packaging Guide
- Debian Packaging Tutorial (from Debian package,
packaging-tutorial)
- hour 2-3: Reading the Debian Packaging Tutorial which led me to
reading
dpkg-sourcemanpage, usingdh_maketo create adebian/skeleton, and modifying the contents of that directory. - hour 4-6: Struggling to kill the lintian complaint,
binary-without-manpage. I went as far as reading the source code (Perl) that performs the check, but that didn't help much. I could have saved hours by looking at the Debian New Maintainers' Guide earlier. I also addedexport LDFLAGS=-Wl,-z,relrotodebian/rulesfile to killhardening-no-relrolintian warning. - hour 7-8: Determine what dependencies would be needed by building from a clean chroot (pbuilder). This was with the help of Debian New Maintainers' Guide, again.
- hour 9-10: Reading Debian wiki page on Hardening let me simplify my packaging further... removing the need to specify hardening flags explicitly. I also uploaded the package to http://mentors.debian.net, with the help of DebianMentorsFaq. (2014.03 update: it has since been removed due to lack of activity)