Woof plans while I'm on holiday

I'm flying to Melbourne on 1st January, for a couple of weeks. As it turns out, I will have a pretty full schedule, and I'll be at places where I will have limited or no Internet access.

I plan to take the Intel Classmate laptop, so that I can keep working on Woof, even if in a more limited way, however, this activity is likely to be severely constrained.

I won't be able to process any CD orders.

On the 31st of December I intend to upload a snapshot of the Woof build system, plus a snapshot live-CD. I don't want any bug reports, however, if you find a bug and fix it ...yes, then I'm interested!

There is one problem with the Woof build system: I have not yet written the '1download' script. The purpose of this script is to download all Ubuntu and PET packages needed by Woof, into 'packages-deb' and 'packages-pet' directories respectively. I will provide a file-list, so you can download manually, however, if someone wants to help out by writing the download script, please do.

There's a file, DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu, that has a table. The entries in the table look like this:

yes|a52dec||exe,dev,doc,nls
yes|abiword|abiword_,abiword-common_|exe,dev,doc,nls

I won't give a full explanation here, but the first one means to use the PET package with the name 'a52dec-<version>.pet' (as the 3rd field is empty) and the second line means to use the Ubuntu packages 'abiword_*.deb' and 'abiword-common_*.deb'.

There two other files, 'Packages-ubuntu-main-intrepid' and 'Packages-ubuntu-universe-intrepid' that can be looked-up to obtain the exact path and filename of the .deb package, then it can be downloaded from an Ubuntu repo.

Note that I found some Ubuntu repos are missing some packages, so the download script would have to be able to search more than one.

The Ubuntu and PET packages have to be downloaded into packages-deb and packages-pet without any subdirectories.

Note, entries in DISTRO_PKGS_SPECS-ubuntu are partial package names, so can have multiple matches:

yes|xserver_xorg|xserver-common_,xserver-xorg_,xserver-xorg-,-xserver-xorg-core-dbg_|exe,dev,doc,nls

In this example, 'xserver-xorg-*' is going to have a lot of matches, but I wanted to exclude one, so '-xserver-xorg-core-dbg_' is excluded. That is, the '-' prefix means to exclude this package even though it is earlier matched.

The above is a suggestion for someone with Bash coding skills and some Ubuntu or Debian familiarity who is interested in Woof and would like to help out. I'll be busy on other things for the next couple of weeks!

Ok, I have just created file lists for manual download. Very tedious though, as you would have to find each one individually and download it -- and there are 689 .deb packages! No man, you'll go mad. Better write the download script!
Regarding .pet packages, look at the 'pet_packages-5' directory on ibiblio first, failing that look in 'pet_packages-4'.

Tags: woof