Comment 4 for bug 1314402

Gunnar,

Thank you for working on this.

I understand the reasons why packaging this is tough. For the same reasons I'm not comfortable uploading this as-is. I'll try and explain the reasons so that we can start a public discussion. If we can get consensus from other Ubuntu developers on the best way to handle some of these issues, then hopefully this can move forward.

0. Thank you for sorting out the licensing question with upstream. Note though that the website says "...under the terms of the GPLv3." and does not say "or later". So shouldn't debian/copyright say GPL-3 and not GPL-3+? If so, the "at your option" part of debian/copyright will need to be fixed, too.

1. I can't think of any mechanism better than the symlink solution and nor can I think of any operational reason why this would be a problem. But I'd like a wider Ubuntu developer audience to publicly confirm that this sounds reasonable before I'm comfortable uploading this. I suggest that we try and get this consensus first, so you don't waste time if this approach is a problem.

2. Why have you not used version "3.0 (quilt)" packaging?

3. Since there isn't a straight download from upstream that gives you the contents of the packaging's orig tarball, please add a debian/README.source that describes how to get the required files from upstream and regenerate the orig tarball. See: http://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/ubuntu-policy/policy.html/ch-source.html#s-readmesource

3b. Presumably upstream don't have "releases" as such, so how will versioning work? I think that maybe you need to note the date and time you downloaded from upstream - either as part of your process in README.source so it ends up in the tree, or perhaps by embedding a timestamp in the version number?

4. Many files in debian/ look essentially generated - they are all in the same form, with only minor changes in each one. To make review easier and reduce the potential for mistakes, can these be generated as part of the package build from a table of provided translations instead? This would reduce review of 27 files to just 3 templates and a table.

5. Can I suggest an "Enhances: skype" type field on the binary packages? http://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/ubuntu-policy/policy.html/ch-relationships.html#s-binarydeps suggests to me that this is suitable. This would be an easier change to make if you were to template debian/control to read from a table as well :)