blog » June 21, 2005/tla-buildpackage

I just started trying out tla-buildpackage yesterday to build a new Debian package of Asymptote. It has a bit of a strange mode of operation (why do I have to be in the +packages/<package>/<package>-<version> directory to build packages?), but it works as advertised — I can use GNU Arch as revision control, for both upstream sources, and my own Debian-specific modifications, and it makes it easy to build clean packages that don’t contain Arch-specific junk. It keeps track of upstream’s original sources, so it can generate the .orig.tar.gz file automatically — I don’t have to keep copies of all that stuff, so my development directory is cleaner.

In other news, I’m now have another package in Debian: I’m co-maintaining AlsaPlayer with Paul Brossier, after the old maintainer orphaned the package. I’m also reading the Debian developer documentation, so in a little while, I’ll be ready to start the application process to become a full Debian developer.