About DebianEdu metapackages ---------------------------- The metapackages should always be installable on a Debian system. Thus no dependency on a non-available package (ie a package available outside of Debian) have been used. However such dependencies have been downgraded to Suggests. Sometimes some non-free packages are suggested when no good free alternatives are known. You're encouraged to find good free replacements. If you want to help, please check http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu Perhaps type-handling might gives us a way to specify arch-dependant dependencies. Building a new version of this package -------------------------------------- Note: When releasing a new version of this package, be sure to cause debian/control to be updated to reflect any changes (added or removed packages) in the Debian archive. As documented in the docs inside the cdd-doc package which is also available online under http://people.debian.org/~tille/cdd/ap-DevelDescription.en.html#s-svn which explains working with SVN in detail do the following: make dist This creates a source package in the parent directory which is tagged by the same version number as in the changelog. Unpack this source package at any other place because the auto generated debian/control file should not be checked into SVN. Then use for instance debuild / pdebuild (but not svn-buildpackage) to build the package. The distribution field in debian/changelog has to have a valid value (UNRELEASED is not allowed, it should be lenny-test atm), since it is used (directly from svn) for the CD and DVD builds. How to add packages to the tasks -------------------------------- See below for a longer explaination. There are several options when adding packages to a task: Depends: These packages are to be installed when the task is installed. Without these the task is not fulfilling its purpose Recommends: These packages are nice to have packages, which will be installed when they are available, and ignored if not. Suggests: These packages will not be installed if available. Ignore: The packages listed here will not be installed by default, but the CD build system will try to make sure the packages are included on the DVD or CD. Avoid: The packages listed here should be kept out of the CDs/DVDs. Dependency graph for the tasks ------------------------------ The task inter-dependencies are documented in the interdepend.dot dot file. To view the dependency graph, run 'dotty interdepend.dot'. How to add packages to the Debian Edu DVD ----------------------------------------- Here is a bit longer intro on how to add packages to the Debian Edu DVD. This assumes the package which is to be added already exists, either in Debian or in the Debian Edu APT repository, and that you have svn access to the debian edu source repository on alioth.debian.org. 1) Fetch the svn source tree svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-edu/trunk/src 2) Move to the task package source files cd src/debian-edu 3) Edit the task you want to modify, adding packages (more on this later), I use the education-common task as an example. emacs tasks/common 4) Update the package changelog, documenting the change. emacs debian/changelog 5) Check the change, make sure nothing unwanted is modified. svn diff 6) Test if the package still builds, as described above in the "Building a new version of this package" paragraph. 7) When the change is complete, commit it to svn, with an explanation on the change, for example the same description stored in the changelog: svn commit -m \ "Depend on openssh-server, to make sure ssh is enabled on all machines"\ debian/changelog tasks/common The task files include blocks like this: Depends: procinfo, sysutils Why: Needed to access procinfo for debugging Responsible: Petter Reinholdtsen NeedConfig: no Instead of 'depends', one can use 'recommends', 'suggests', 'ignore' and 'avoid'. They affect how the package is included on the DVD and CDs, and if they are installed by default or not. The depends, recommends and suggests are listed in the metapackages. The packages listed as depends are included first on the DVD and CDs, and are installed if the installation system find the packages. The recommended packages are included next and installed if found by the installation system, bur are at the moment unlikely to make it onto the CDs. Recommends make it into to DVD. The suggested packages are unlikely to make it into the CDs, but make it into the DVD. They are not installed by default. The ignored packages are included on the DVD, but are not installed. The avoided packages are excluded from the DVD and CDs, and thus not installed nor available. New packages you want to have included should start as ignored packages, to get them on the DVD but not installed by default. When they are found to be useful, we can update them to suggests (to make them more visible, but not installed by default). If they are really useful, possible to preseed and work out of the box, we can move them to recommend or depend, but before this is done, we need to verify that the disk space required is available in the default installation. We are currently using 1.6 GiB of the 4.4 GiB DVD capasity. The rest of the DVD content is popular packages according to popcon.debian.org (so the most commonly used packages are included first). This mean we have heap of space available for packages. Do not be afraid of listing packages as ignore, to get them on our radar.