This page thanks to great work from ?TimHall, shamelessly re-used by dancerj, updated by billitch.
Packages maintained by the Debian Multimedia Team
Here you can find a list of packages maintained by the Debian Multimedia Team:
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
New packages should set the Maintainer field to Debian Multimedia Maintainers <pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>. Existing packages should move to using that address on a best-effort basis.
All source packages shoud use the pkg-multimedia git area in alioth.
How to help with packaging
The Debian Multimedia Maintainers need help to create new Debian packages and maintain the existing ones. If you want to contribute to this effort, but you are new to the Debian packaging systems, here follows some information to get you started.
Packaging guidelines
Packages should use git, as mentioned above. Desirable is being able to use git-buildpackage.
Upstream sources should be kept in the upstream branch and the the debian packaging in the master branch.
quilt should be used for patch management, and the master branch should only differ from the upstream branch in files inside the debian/ directory. This means no direct changes to the source in the master branch.
The maintainer field should be set to Debian Multimedia Maintainers <pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org>
The git repository should be hosted in alioth, under the pkg-multimedia project. It should forward commit messages to pkg-multimedia-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org and package_cvs@packages.qa.debian.org
- You can use the setup-repository script in /git/pkg-multimedia to create the bare repository with commit messages enabled. The repository should be named as the source package name for the message forwarding to work (eg, the repository for source package liblo is named liblo.git).
- The control file should use the Vcs-Git and Vcs-Browser tags.
Workflow guidelines
One change per commit. This is very important, it eases review, cherry picking, bisecting (and thus debugging) and backporting.
Do not commit debian/changelog along with the changes. This practice makes cherry picking and backporting changes unnecessary hard. The changelog is generated with git-dch(1) at the time of upload.
The commit message should have a short (<78 characters) summary of the change followed by a newline. After that, you can elaborate on the change. The summary is treated specially by various tools like git-dch(1), or the commitdiff mailer.
- After each upload, the first commit should be creating a new changelog entry, to ease testing of unreleased packages.
Documentation
git-buildpackage online documentation (offline: /usr/share/doc/git-buildpackage/manual-html)
Proposing new packages for pkg-multimedia
Don't bother with git for packaging new software. Instead, package it properly following DebianPolicy and the DevelopersReference.
If you are confident with your package, propose it for review on the pkg-multimedia-maintainers mailing list. Link to your package preferably in a way that can be easily used with ?dget. The debian mentors site is a good place.
- Members of the team will then review your package and give you hints how to improve it. If the package is "good enough" (at the reviewer's discretion), he will setup a repository on git.debian.org and integrate your package while preserving attribution.
Working on existing packages with git for newbies
As a very basic introduction, first read PackagingWithGit.
We generally follow the workflow and defaults of git-buildpackage
locate the packaging branch on http://git.debian.org. All pkg-multimedia branches have pkg-multimedia in their url. Click on the leftmost link in that line. That will bring you to the summary of the project.
- Note the metadata just above the shortlog, it contains 2 URLs, one of
them starting with git://
then git-clone(1) to get a copy of the repository. E.g.
git clone git://git.debian.org/pkg-multimedia/jack-audio-connection-kit.git
- Do changes to that branch, build the package, test your changes, and commit early and often!
- If someone else has committed while you are working on the branch, you need to integrate his changes. For this you have 2 options:
if your local changes are rather minor and clean, rebase when using git-pull(1):
git pull --rebase origin
- if you rather don't want to break your history because you think that your changes are rather large and are likely to interfere with the other changes, better merge them with:
git pull origin
In case you want to cleanup your local commits before pushing, use git-rebase(1):
git rebase -i origin/master
- You will be presented a textfile where you can specify what of your local commits you want to modify, drop or squish (merge with the previous one). You can also improve your commit message here. Make sure that you don't rewrite already published commits.
In order to get comments on your (preferably cleaned up) commits, use git-format-patch(1) to generate patches of your commits and email them to the mailing list. Any committer can do this while preserving attribution.
- None of the steps above require membership in the pkg-multimedia alioth group. All of that can be done totally anonymously!
Tasks for team members
Uploading proposed package to the team git repository
- First create a repository on git.debian.org:
$ ssh git.debian.org /git/pkg-multimedia/setup-repository <project>
- Then import the sources locally, register the remote archive and push your commits (i.e. upload changes) with the following commands:
$ cd /path/to/sources/ $ git-import-dsc --pristine-tar <project>_0.0.1-1.dsc $ cd <project> $ git remote add alioth ssh://user@git.debian.org/git/pkg-multimedia/<project>.git $ git push alioth master $ git push alioth upstream $ git push alioth pristine-tar $ git push alioth $ git push alioth --tags
Work in progress : We're checking all the WNPP bugs and updating infos on this page.
-- billitch