[PD-dev] Debian Policy for Pd packages

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 1, 2010, at 3:38 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>>
>> Hey all,
>>
>> Just finished a weekend long Debian Bug Squashing Party here in  
>> NYC.  I
>> discussed with a few Debian Developers how best to fit Pd's files  
>> into
>> Debian Policy.  This is what we came up with.  Let me know what you  
>> guys
>> think, and whether there are other things to add.
>>
>>    * While .pd files are plain text, they are really like scripts  
>> most
>> of all, and should be treated that way. That means they should go  
>> into
>> /usr/lib/pd rather than the data dir /usr/share/pd
>>    *help patches are just Pd patches, which are just scripts, so it  
>> is
>> also ok for them to be included in /usr/lib/pd.
>>    * Help patches are not really useful to read outside of Pd so the
>> help patches should not go into `/usr/share/doc'
>>    * HTML, PDFs?, .txt, and READMEs? should go into /usr/share/doc  
>> like
>> any other package
>
> i guess this pretty much expresses the current state of the puredata
> package, no?
>
> one issue that seems to have been untouched: what about "examples"?  
> e.g.
> Gem has a largish collection of example Pd patches, which  
> traditionally
> go into /usr/share/doc (and are then symlinked to /usr/lib/pd to  
> make Pd
> find it)
> i still very much like this, and for me it seems like it is in
> accordance to what other packages do: about 10% of the packages
> installed on my machine have a /usr/share/doc/<package>/examples/
> directory, which is often filled with rcfiles and/or programming
> examples. e.g. loads of python modules will put example code into this
> directory.


FYI:  was mostly discussing this stuff in the context of the libdir/ 
dirlib approach of having all the files related to a library in a self- 
contained folder.  I believe this is a good approach for Pd, so I was  
thinking about how it can fit into Debian Policy, which is going to be  
helpful for UNIX distros in general.

So I am thinking now that we should package libraries as libdirs in / 
usr/lib/pd, then symlink things to other appropriate places.  Then in  
the Pd implementation, we can count on libdirs always being there, but  
from the Debian side, everything will be accessible from the right  
places.

While I think that help patches don't belong in /usr/share/doc/ 
<package>, I think it could make sense to put examples into /usr/share/ 
pd or maybe /usr/share/doc/pd.  AFAIK, the stuff in /usr/share/doc/ is  
meant to be readable plain text, like via less, a web browser, text  
editor, or something like that.  Pd patches are not, so it might not  
make much sense to put them in /usr/share/<package> or /usr/share/doc/ 
<package>.  It doesn't really hurt either, so symlinking stuff to /usr/ 
share/doc/<package> seems workable.

.hc


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