[dsc] dsc wishlist for building a Debian package

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

I am currently trying to package up dsc for Debian as package
dsc-statistics (see also http://bugs.debian.org/505405). In the course
of preparing the package, I have discovered several issues, which may
be worth fixing in dsc itself.

Hardest thing first: the presenter depends on IP::Country, which is
not yet packaged for Debian. And packaging IP::Country is problematic,
since it contains a database which is copyrighted by the RIRs and thus
cannot be part of Debian main. Would it possible to adapt DSC in a way
that IP::Country would only be optional, with only the geoIP-based
statistics being unavailable if IP::Country isn't present? As an
alternative, is it possible to make dsc use Geo::IP, which looks like
it's significantly better maintained and which is already supported in
Debian?

That being said, here are the other issues that have surfaced during
my packaging attempts:

(1)
collector/make clean doesn't work on freshly unpacked source which
breaks Debian's build process which starts off by a make clean call.
Local fix applied, upstream fix appreciated. Suggestion: use
autoconf/automake

(2)
collector/make clean calls configure script. This is kind of strange
and breaks the build of the Debian source package (which builds a diff
from the original tar and the cleaned source directory to find out
what Debian changed).
Local fix applied, upstream fix appreciated. Suggestion: use
autoconf/automake

(3)
The paths that dsc uses are not FHS conformant and changing them needs
a dive into the source code and the Make files to make them compliant.
Local fix applied, upstream fix appreciated. Suggestion: use
autoconf/automake

(4)
Proper .PHONY targets are missing in the make files, causing strange
behavior during package build.
Local fix applied, upstream fix appreciated. Suggestion: use
autoconf/automake

(5)
Debian doesn't use .pl and .sh suffixes to scripts.
Local fix applied, upstream solution would be nice. Suggestion: ditch
suffixes in distribution

(6)
perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor
$(MAKE) install DESTDIR=$(CURDIR)/debian/<tmp>
installs .pm files to
$(CURDIR)/presenter/debian/<tmp>/$(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/share/perl5
instead of the expected
$(CURDIR)/debian/<tmp>/usr/share/perl5
which is contrary to what people are used from other Makefiles created
by MakeMaker, which do the expected thing.
Local fix applied, upstream solution appreciated.

(7)
Is the documentation available in the (obvious) .tex source format?
Can it be included in the .tar.gz?


I have patched all issues so that the Debian package doesn't have any
of these issues any more, but packaging would be significantly easier
if the issues were addressed upstream. My patches are usually curing
the symptoms and are surely not appropriate for applying them to your
package, but I can publish them some time next week if you want to see
them.

I would like to solicit comments from the DSC authors and the
community before I go ahead and prepare and upload the package.

Any comments will be appreciated.

Greetings
Marc

-- 
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Marc Haber         | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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