linuxmint-community-repository-project team mailing list archive

[doug <dhargraft@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Dave.
I'm also new at this. The only .deb packages I've done myself are Wine,
every two weeks. After the ./configure and make, using checkinstall instead
of make install creates the .deb wine package and then installs it.

However, I'm "retired" (actually, disability pension; I'm decades away from
retirement age) so I have lots of time to learn & contribute. In the good
ol' DOS days I programed databases using Clipper, which was very popular in
the late '80s and early '90s but never made the transition to Windows. So
although I'm new to modern programming languages, the basic structure is the
same. I also dabbled in C, and have a new(ish) textbook on Python.

So, tell me where to start & I will learn and get there.

Two apps I want, are a utility to reinstall grub (that I badly miss from
Mepis) and an update to fsck. the latter being used in most distros is
somewhere around v.1.4.x but if you look at the homepage is up to v3.5 or so
(but I can't even find the homepage right now).

But I'll work on anything needed.

Looking forward to getting this show going!!
Doug.
(locutus on the Mint forums, but I'll stick with my real name here)



On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Dave <psych1610@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hey I just wanted to say hi to everyone who's already signed up, partly to
say Hi and partly to make sure I got my filters set up right in Thunderbird
and I'm actually talking to the right group.

I was real excited when I read about this up on the site and I think it's
just a great idea. I've been reading up on how to make .debs and all that
fun stuff and with a bit of practice I might actually just be able to do it.

Also this is as good a place as any to come out and beg for help, see when I
said with a bit of practice I meant it but for me that could be a few years.
I'd like to ask anyone that already knows how to do this to maybe lend me a
hand and help teach me so I don't screw things up. While I'm on that topic I
think it might be an excellent idea to utilize the mentoring feature
available on launchpad (if its sort of like what we need) or just to
organize some kind of mentoring thing. I'd be more than willing to be one as
soon as I figure out what the heck I'm doing and I suspect plenty of other
people wouldn't mind getting involved, except they have no clue how to
package .debs. Unfortunately, it wasn't a skill I ever picked up along the
way. The little bit I know has been picked up from reading how to install
and/or compile.

Having said all that I also had a few ideas I wanted to pitch to everyone to
see what they think. I've come from two (ok maybe 5 or 6) other distros but
only two that really influenced this. The first, PCLinuxOS, had a separate
sub forum (like us) for packages and the maintainers of the distro and
another group called Santas Little Helpers (the equivalent of us) would
package up things that the community had requested and voted on. It was a
great system and was useful for getting additional programs into the
repository. I'm not sure of how useful it would be for us since we already
fall back on Ubuntu's (and to some extent debians?) monstrous repositories.
Essentially people would request an application or an update to an
application, a link to the source of it, and a description of it and others
could vote giving the packagers an idea of what was wanted the most. Since
one has to be a member of the forums to see that sub forum if there's
interest in something like this I can copy and paste over the rules for it,
etc.

Another thing I had thought of was from my days at Arch. They had a
community repository like we now do (or have had for a while I guess) and
they elect maintainers for certain packages. I think that could be a good
idea for the less popular apps that Ubuntu seems to forget about like
gnome-do (currently behind the stable) as well as a few others I can think
of. This would go a long way in keeping our repository and apps up to date
with the latest stables out there. I for one would volunteer to keep a few
of the ones I use on a regular basis and even add one or two that's not even
in Ubuntu's repository.

Hmm, I'm really sorry for this massive email. Just had a lot of thoughts to
get out and real excited to get started.

Dave