[zeromq-dev] Debian package / small manpage issue

[Peter Busser]

Adrian,

> For future work: are you planning to become Debian maintainer of zeromq
> packages, do you want to share the work with me, or was your work a one-off
> to get initial packages?  I don't want to hijack your efforts and tread on
> anybody's toes.

No, I am not planning to become a Debian maintainer for these
packages. You don't have to worry about treading on any one's toes. As
I have told Martin before, you can consider the debianisation files to
be public domain. So if you want to change copyrights or whatever,
that's fine with me. I am only interested in getting the highest
quality Debian packages for 0MQ, that's all. Although having some
credit for my work would be nice.

I made these packages for my own use, since I intend to use 0MQ with
Common Lisp for applications which I am going to write. But these
changes are obviously useful for others as well, which is why I
donated them to the 0MQ project.

>> The current packages/debian builds the following packages:
>>
>> zeromq-examples_1.9-1m_amd64.deb
>
> Is this package useful in any way?  I think it'd be better to ship the
> example (in source only) in the -dev package in /usr/share/doc/example.

Good question. It makes sense to put them in the -dev package yes.

>> zeromq-perf_1.9-1m_amd64.deb
>> zeromq-utils_1.9-1m_amd64.deb
>
> If perf is only very small, I think it could be merged with -utils. I think
> having too many packages for only a few files is not actually useful (people
> who really need to save the space, like for example embedded folks, usually
> use stripped down versions of everything anyway.)

Yes and no. The performance tests and the utilities are unrelated to
each other, they serve separate purposes. That is what made me put
them in separate packages. OTOH, I don't think the performance tests
work at all, so we might as well remove that package altogether.

>> And openpgm is included in the ZeroMQ source tarball, it is located
>> in: ./foreign/openpgm/libpgm-2.0.20rc5.tar.bz2
>
> I saw that, but including stuff like that is terrible for [long term]
> security support.  As long as nobody else uses openpgm it's no problem, but
> as soon as there are other users, bugs in openpgm will have to be fixed
> separately everywhere.

True. That might be an issue if and when 0MQ gets included in Debian.
For the time being however, it works well. Adding Python, Ruby, and
Java support and fixing lintian warnings would be more important
things to look at IMHO.

Groetjes,
Peter.