Building recent linux-libre and icecat packages for more GNU/Linux distributions

[Daniel Clark]

So just 2 quick things:

(1) I found the documentation on how Debian and Ubuntu actually build
their linux packages that both gnufs (of http://aligunduz.org/gNewSense/
which provides recent linux-libre for i386 gNewSense) and I were somehow
missing - links to the doc are up at:

http://config.fsf.org/trac/membercard/ticket/12

Neither GNU/Linux distribution uses make-kpkg as the easy to find doc -
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-kernel.en.html - would suggest - linux
built this way will fail to work with dkms / to build 3rd party modules
and has other issues I'm forgetting about at the moment.

I'm in the process of using the Ubuntu documentation to build a
2.6.28-libre for Trisquel amd64 based on Ubuntu 2.6.28 most recent
tagged jaunty git + linux-libre 2.6.28 deblob - I'll also be building
that for gNewSense to close the above-referenced ticket soon :-)

(2) For building linux-libre (and perhaps other pieces of freed
software, like GNU IceCat) for more GNU/Linux distributions (most
important I think are to have easy to install recent linux-libre
packages for all of the Libre GNU/Linux platforms, but if it isn't much
harder I don't think it's a mistake to also do for for the upstream
distributions).

I'm wondering if people have ideas / know about projects to make doing
this easy - the one project I've come across that I've been meaning to
spend some time playing with is:

http://trac.project-builder.org/

From the website: "Project-Builder.org is a tool that helps you build
packages for your application (provided as tar file, or through a
configuration management system such as CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, or
Git). It is able to generate build package skeleton for your project,
and with simple configuration files to generate for up to 50 different
tuples of distributions (name, version, architecture), including Fedora,
Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Slackware."

I'm also planning looking at it for a few other projects I work on when
time allows - http://code.autonomo.us/tktview?name=2bcd47e186 ,
http://bcfg2.org/ticket/651 - but thought I'd post here in case someone
else has time to do it first, or knows of other free software in this
space it would be good to try.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel JB Clark   | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation
pobox.com/~dclark | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny

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