Packaging Frescobaldi for Debian/Ubuntu

anthony@anthonyfok.org (Anthony Fok) — Sun, 25 Jan 2015 06:23:00 -0700

I co-maintain the Debian package for Frescobaldi, an excellent LilyPond sheet music text editor. This blog post documents the steps to svn-buildpackage to prepare and upload the frescobaldi Debian package when a new version is available.

(This is still a working draft. Please forgive some of my random disorganized notes.)

What to do when a new upstream version is released?

1. Upgrade the local build environment

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo cowbuilder --update --override-config

2. Fetch the new upstream version

cd /work/debian/frescobaldi
svn update
cd trunk
debian/rules get-orig-source
mv -vi frescobaldi* ../tarballs/
dch -i

Note: svn-upgrade is not used because it is not yet aware of uscan’s repacked package, resulting in the error: couldn't find the downloaded file at /usr/bin/svn-upgrade line 71.

sudo cowbuilder --update --override-config
- esp. when changing mirror, e.g. from ftp.hk.debian.org to ftp.ca.debian.org

3. Revise–Test Build cycle:

# Research, edit debian/* ...
vim debian/copyright

#
svn-buildpackage -us -uc --svn-ignore-new     or    svn-do pdebuild

4. Final build

# Change `UNRELEASED` to `unstable`, and update the timestamp
# in debian/changelog
dch -r

# Do a final check
svn status

# Commit all changed files
svn commit -m "Release frescobaldi 2.17.2+ds1-1 for Debian"

# Alternatively, to commit only some specified files:
# svn commit debian/files-to-commit

And finally:

svn-buildpackage --svn-builder="pdebuild --buildresult `pwd`/../build-area --auto-debsign" --svn-lintian --svn-tag --svn-noautodch

5. Final verifications before upload

debc        # To look at the file list
sudo debi   # To install locally

# Look at the build area:
ls ../build-area/ -lrt

# Examine build log
less ../build-area/frescobaldi_2.17.2+ds1-1_amd64.build

6. Upload!

dput ../build-area/frescobaldi_2.17.2+ds1-1_amd64.changes

Done!

7. Follow-up

Look for a message titled “frescobaldi_2.17.2+ds1-1_amd64.changes ACCEPTED into unstable” sent by ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org to your mailbox.
A day later, the new package should appear on https://packages.debian.org/frescobaldi and http://packages.ubuntu.com/frescobaldi

Troubleshooting: To revise a commit log message:

ssh svn.debian.org
cd /svn/python-apps/hooks
cp -vi pre-revprop-change.tmpl pre-revprop-change
chmod +x pre-revprop-change

# Local machine
EDITOR=vim svn propedit -r xxxxx --revprop svn:log

# On svn.debian.org
rm pre-revprop-change

Regular maintenance:

sudo cowbuilder --update --override-config
- esp. when changing mirror, e.g. from ftp.hk.debian.org to ftp.ca.debian.org
cd /work/debian/frescobaldi/trunk
svn-do pdebuild

See: http://blog.elijaa.org/index.php?post/2010/09/23/revprop-change-blocked-by-pre-revprop-change-hook-%28exit-code-255%29-with-no-output-error

Every half year?

sudo rm -rf /var/cache/pbuilder/base.cow/
sudo pbuilder --clean
- removes /var/cache/pbuilder/build/ and /var/cache/pbuilder/aptcache/
sudo cowbuilder --create
- This will take about 15 minutes?

Hyphenation is missing for many languages…

Ryan (rak) removed frescobaldi_app/hyphdict/* to avoid duplication and the complexity of tracking copyrights.
However Debian’s hyphenation is incomplete. For example, hyph_nl_NL.dic, hyph_uk.dic, etc. are missing.

Ubuntu is improving it:

openoffice.org-hyphenation (Ubuntu-only package), which contains e.g. hyph_nl
libreoffice-dictionaries, replacing the outdated openoffice.org-dictionaries still in Debian.

Licensing issue (OpenOffice.org)

Someone called “doko” filed mass bug reports on openoffice.org:

meta report for license issues of hyphenation patterns available on the web site https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=74283

hyph_nl_NL.dic:

https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=74265

Miscellaneous

The License field should use A, and B or C, not A and (B or C)
LPPL-1.3c: https://latex-project.org/lppl.txt
- Reflections on the history of the LATEX Project Public License (LPPL) — A software license for LATEX and more http://latex-project.org/papers/tb100mittbach-lppl-history.pdf
- http://opensource.org/licenses/LPPL-1.3c
SISSL-1.1:
- http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/sissl_license.html
- http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/sissl_license_1-1.pdf

PortMIDI

https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/issues/3
frescobaldi_app/portmidi/__init__.py

Key points:

Debian packaging

Packaged by Ryan. He got too busy with school work in latter half of 2013, and the package fell behind.
PAPT (Python Application Team): https://alioth.debian.org/projects/python-apps/
- Besides applying to join the team on Alioth, I needed to write
Build with svn-buildpackage
- Browse: http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/python-apps/packages/frescobaldi/
- Note, only the debian/ directory is committed in the SVN repository.
Repack source… +ds1
- Old method:
  - clean-up.sh?
  - XZ_OPT=-9v fakeroot tar cvJf frescobaldi_2.0.13+ds1.tar.xz frescobaldi-2.0.13+ds1
- New method
  - TODO

Chinese L10n:

Fork from upstream author Wilbert Berendsen’s GitHub https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi to https://github.com/anthonyfok/frescobaldi
To add: zh_CN, zh_HK, zh_TW
First began translating in
Start with zh_TW, and auto-convert to zh_CN and zh_HK?
Lokalize?

Keeping my branch updated: (see http://robots.thoughtbot.com/keeping-a-github-fork-updated)

git fetch upstream
git checkout master
git rebase upstream/master
git push

git checkout l10n-zh
git rebase upstream/master
cd frescobaldi_app/po
make zh_TW.po			# runs msgmerge
cd ../..
cd frescobaldi_app/language_names

# ensure my changes are in:

What about my l10n-zh branch?

KDE L10n, esp. zh_HK

Howard Chan (smartboyhw)

弗雷斯科巴爾迪

http://lilypond.blog.sohu.com/

Working with SVN and svn-buildpackage

Refer to: https://wiki.debian.org/svn-buildpackage

(To be organized)

foka@debian-Aspire-M5-481G:/work/debian/frescobaldi/trunk$ svn proplist ./debian/

Properties on ‘debian’:

mergeWithUpstream

Fetch new upstream source:

go to a previous build-area, e.g. /work/debian/frescobaldi/build-area/frescobaldi-2.0.13+ds1.obsolete.0.119643281520442, and run “uscan”, which reads debian/watch and fetch the tarball from GitHub.

cd ..
tar xf frescobaldi-2.0.16.tar.gz
cd frescobaldi-2.0.16
../frescobaldi-2.0.13+ds1.obsolete.0.119643281520442/debian/cleanup.sh
mv frescobaldi-2.0.16 frescobaldi-2.0.16+ds1
XZ_OPT=-9v fakeroot tar cvJf frescobaldi_2.0.16+ds1.orig.tar.xz frescobaldi-2.0.16+ds1

After upload (?), do a

svn update

to fetch the tag in svn.

Assorted Links

To add:

Note to self:

The upstream Frescobaldi is maintained in GitHub. Ironically, the Debian frescobaldi package is maintained in SVN because the Python Applications Packaging Team python-apps-team@lists.alioth.debian.org maintains everything in SVN.

History / Log

2014-01-18: Uploaded frescobaldi_2.0.13+ds1; wrote note in /home/foka/wiki-frescobaldi.txt
2014-07-25: Old build in /work/debian/frescobaldi-2.0.16+ds1
2014-07-25: Contributed “Initial l10n for Chinese (zh_CN, zh_HK, zh_TW)”
2014-07-26: Wilbert Berendsen merged my pull request.
2014-08-02: Updated debian/watch
2014-08-05: Updated debian/README.source
2014-09-17: Moved this document from Google Docs to Hugo Markdown
2014-08-07: Last touched debian/copyright
2014-12-20: Touching frescobaldi again
2014-12-21: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.0.16+ds1-1)
2014-12-27: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.17.1+ds1-1)
2015-01-25: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.17.2+ds1-1)
2015-09-15: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.18.1+ds1-1)
2015-09-15: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.18.1+ds1-2)
2015-11-21: Uploaded frescobaldi (2.18.1+ds1-3)
2015-12-26: Packaged frescobaldi 2.18.2 but not uploaded… It turns out I need to upgrade python-ly from 0.9.2 to 0.9.3 first.

Svn Buildpackage on Anthony’s Adventure