gnubg

I spent essentially the entire day today, apart from watching football, on packaging GNU Backgammon. This turned out to be more work than I expected, but it's really interesting work and I'm learning a lot. This program has an insane number of dependencies, from BLAS math libraries to Guile and Python to a ton of different graphics and sound libraries for the new 3D board support.

Most of the afternoon was spent working on the build dependencies, which aren't really documented in the upstream documentation and therefore required going through configure.in seeing what libraries it looks for. Then there were some gcc 4 problems that had to be fixed, and I had to remove the manual because it was covered under the GFDL.

This seemed like a good project to start learning quilt with, so I read through the quilt manual and then set it up (which required poking around some since I used the wrong setting in my .quiltrc originally). Now, all that's left is forcing it to link dynamically with Python (the upstream configure.in always chooses the static library), writing two more man pages for utility programs that didn't have any, and mailing some patches and some questions to upstream (including the request to relicense the manual). I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to package the manual for non-free or just refer people to the web version.

Other than that, I did clean up the kitchen, shelve about half the books that needed shelving (just the mass market paperbacks left to go), and cleaned the place up a little. I didn't get much reading done, nor did I do any INN work, catch up farther on my personal e-mail, do any of the piles of Debian work I want to get to, or write any book reviews. Ah well. It's wonderful -- it's felt like Sunday all day today and yet it's only Saturday and I have a whole weekend left before a three-day work week.

Now, it's off to do some reading. I'll hopefully be able to finish gnubg packaging and upload the new version (to sit in NEW, since I broke some things out into a separate gnubg-data package) tomorrow.

Posted: 2006-01-14 23:43 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2013-01-04