[Gnumed-devel] Re: Gnumed "check for updates"

[Andreas Tille]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009, Jim Busser wrote:

> Presently the client will advise the availability of 0.3.11 however the user 
> may not realize that this is a tarball and may not reflect a packaged 
> release.

IMHO you should decide about the following issues:

 1. How fast do you need an update to a new version?
 2. Do you want either updates rolled out by a package manager (like
    dpkg or rpm) or do you prefer an update mechanism inside GNUmed
    itself?  (I'd strongly vote against two "competing" upgrade
    mechanisms!)

If you decide for a package manager (which would be reasonable IMHO, but
I'm biased) and the current frequency of updates is not enough we need
a stronger packaging team than one person.  While GNUmed Debian packages
are formally done by a team (Debian-Med Packaging Team) it is effectively
me.  I guess in cases when I announced vacations and there are security
problems hopefully somebody else will step in, but not for "normal"
updates.  The only way to decrease the delay of new upstream versions
and available packages is if you join the packaging team and do the work
(which is basically editing a changelog entry and rebuild the package).
This is what I suggested to Sebastian last week.  I think in the last
updates of gnumed-client we had a delay of less than a week which is
not bad compared to the majority of packages inside Debian.  If this is
not sufficient for your needs you are welcome to make the situation even
better but I doubt that this is really needed considering the small user
base.  As a local solution for you if you want to stay close I'd suggest
the following workflow:

 1. Unpack new tarball and set a symlink
      ln -s GNUmed-client.0.3.11.tgz gnumed-client_0.3.11.orig.tar.gz
    (Debian source tarballs are named <name>_version.orig.tar.gz)
 2. svn checkout 
svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/packages/gnumed-client/trunk/
 3. copy the Debian directory into the unpackaged tarball
 4. Adapt the version in debian/changelog
 5. debuild -k'Your GPG key'
 6. dpkg -i *.deb

This is basically what I'm doing if there are no changes to packaging
needed and this way you get some local packages before official ones
occure.

Kind regards

        Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de