[IAEP] Packaging eToys (was Sugar on Edubuntu)

[Gavin Romig-Koch]

Greg Dekoenigsberg wrote:
>>
>> Please note that the reason for eToys being kept out of debian "main" 
>> is *not* that it is considered non-free.
>>
>> Debian maintains more than 20.000 packages, and eToys as so far been 
>> judged too "odd" for Debian to maintain, eg. for patching in case of 
>> security issues.
>>
>> Yes, I know that upstream developers of eToys, as most upstream
>> developers of large projects, will find it unnecessary for Debian to
>> take such responsibility in the first place. That Debian can simply rely
>> on upstream to handle bug-fixing including security issues.
>>
>> But Debian wants the ability to handle it on their own. With the help
>> from upstream as needd, but fundamentally have the ability to e.g
>> consider something worthy of fixing that upstream perhaps do not find
>> relevant to fix.
>
> This is going to be a bit of an issue with Fedora as well, to be 
> honest. The structure of eToys is very alien to what packagers are 
> accustomed to dealing with.  Copying Gavin Romig-Koch... Gavin, now 
> that the licensing issues have been worked out, have you started 
> working on the Fedora packages?  I wonder if there are any lessons 
> that can be shared between Debian and Fedora maintainers in this case.
Yes, I have been working on packaging up Squeak and EToys.   The work is 
slow, I don't have much free time.   My work can be found:  
http://code.google.com/p/squeak-fedora/

I didn't realize that there actually were Debian packages.  I'll take a 
look at them to see what I can learn and borrow from them.

I wasn't aware of Debian's policy requirement to "handle it on their 
own".   Greg, does Fedora have a similar policy?    I am perfectly 
capable of finding and fixing issues if necessary, but I would not want 
to try to second guess the developers of these particular packages about 
the suitablity of a particular patch.

The structure of EToys and Squeak is not so much alien, as continuing an 
(IMO natural) progression.  With code written in C (and similar) there 
is a well understood separation of Source Code, Binary Code, and 
Data/Content.   With Python (and similar) one can still see those same 
lines, but they are much blurier.   With Squeak and EToys the lines are 
almost impossible to see.  

                                                                                                                       
-gavin...