The
Chemnitzer
Linux-Tage are over and I'm back home. Again it was an outstanding event.
Starting from the overall organisation to the social event (and their quiz) to
the catering... I'm still stuffed with the buffet of the social event :)
The first thing in the morning I did a workshop about Debian package
building. It was very well visited; only two seats were left empty. The
visitors were very good; understood most very fast and corrected me a couple of
times, when I did copy'n paste mistakes. It was fun to do that, and I got good
feedback.
BTW: If you need a small example to show someone how to create a Debian
package, you might want to take a look an
gnujump. The templates created
by
dh_make work nearly out of the box (so you can concentrate on
explaining what is done, instead of fixing stuff to get it working), while the
resulting package has still place for improvements (
.menu and
.desktop files; splitting the package into a arch dependent and an
arch independent; etc.) And most important: It is compiles quite fast, while
you still have something to show, so your visitors will see, that you indeed
did something.
Talking about the feedback I got after the workshop: One guy asked me about
a way to check for conflicting packages, and we all wondered, that there's
nothing scripted available, yet. So I promised to hack something together to
at least check for conflicting files. The result is available at
conflict finder (and later an
svn.schmehl.info, as soon as I find out how to setup webdav/svn to allow read
access to some repositories and not others).
To check for packages your package should conflict with, you need to first
build your package (or we won't know which files are in your package) and give
the path to the resulting
.deb as the first parameter to the
script. If you have a
Contents-foo.gz file somewhere on your hard
disc, you can specify the path to that file as the second parameter (if you use
apt-file or have a local mirror, it'll try to find it; if
everything fails the script will try to download one).
Then the script will check for each file of your Debian-Package if there is
any other package having the same file. Sounds cool, but is damn slow; the
repeated zgrep over the Contents-File is quite time consuming. For a quite
small package (
xdialog) it
took nearly 15 minutes to complete. Wow, when I hacked it together, I wouldn't
have thought it would be that slow.
As far as I know
Alexander Wirt
is already working on an improved version using some kind of database (and
perl).
Welcome to this 2nd issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the 
.