Development/Howto/Submitter
From Mandriva
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Here is some useful information about how to invest your efforts wisely.
Selecting packages
Package maintainers already have automated notifications of update availability, as well as automated rebuild tools. So basically submitting an updated version of a simple package, such as a perl module, is just a waste of time.
On the other hand, existing package fixes, or non-trivial updates, are welcome, but you may want first to ensure the official package maintainer's interest. It is no use to waste your time if he's gonna ignore you or reject your work.
New packages, of course, are welcome, but you'll have to find a maintainer interested in adopting it.
Creating packages
Basically, you are asking someone else (a maintainer) to endorse responsability for your package, including making it compliant with Mandriva policy. The more additional work he will have to do for this, the higher chances are he will ignore or reject your own work. So do yourself a favor, and try to achieve maximum compliance directly.
Your package must:
- comply with Mandriva policy. Check various informations available on the wiki on this subject (such as the RPM HowTo), and various packaging policies, and run rpmlint on your package.
- build successfully on cooker. New package release only happens there.
- be based on latest cooker release. You can't submit new packages, or start from older releases.
Uploading packages
You must upload your source packages only (no need to waste bandwidth and disk space) to ftp://ftp.mandriva.com/incoming/cooker. Then advertise it on the cooker mailing-list. For backports and club packages upload your package to ftp://ftp.mandriva.com/incoming/RELEASE where RELEASE is the Mandriva Linux release the package is to be built for (e.g. 10.2, 2006.0 etc.), then notify the club package manager at about it (for club), otherwise .
As an alternative, if you just make minor modifications to an existing spec file, just sending the spec diff to the maintainer, with eventually additional sources, may be enough. Determining the maintainer of a package is possible through rpmmon, or directly from http://qa.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/srpmmaints.cgi
Becoming an internal contributor
If you often submit packages, you may request an internal contributor account. There is no strict policy about conditions, current behaviour is trust based. You need to maintain several packages and to have already worked closely with contributors on the cooker mailing list. Before asking for an account you should submit your packages to cooker people who will review and upload them. Basically, if you demonstrated correct mastership of packaging, you'll be accepted. If you're done with those steps (and maybe some contributors will ask an account for you) you can ask for an account, providing him:
- a preferred login name
- a GPG public key
- a preferred email address
You will receive a [email protected] alias forwarding mail to your email address when you get subscribed to the maintainers mailing-list.
You'll also receive in the mail encrypted (with your GPG key) information concerning your access that you can see by saving the content into a file and using gpg -d on it.
You have to create a Bugzilla account too, in order to receive bug reports for your packages. See Mandriva Bugzilla for details.
