[Snowball-discuss] Shared Library? Releases?

[Stefano Rivera]

I've recently packaged snowball and pystemmer for Debian. There were a
few issues I encountered in doing this, namely:

1. Snowball doesn't have any numbered releases, so we are getting our
   source from svn and numbering the version after the svn commit ID.
   [0]
   Debian builds all packages from source, so the pre-generated
   libstemmer C-files are not usable for Debian source.
2. Snowball doesn't build a shared library, and thus doesn't maintain
   SONAME versions itself. For debian I have used the SONAME
   libstemmer.so.0d.0.0. [1]
   Given the stability of this project, there probably won't be too many
   ABI changes, but would you like to update your Makefile to produce a
   shared library, and take over SONAME maintenance?
3. Snowball doesn't include a COPYING file in the source, although
   pystemmer does, so we cribbed from there.
4. -Iinclude is really a CPPFLAG. Moving it there allows CFLAGS to be
   overridden.
5. Pystemmer's test suite doesn't return an error code if there were
   errors. [3]

While I'm able to work around the above (and have done so so far), it
would be helpful if Snowball would maintain its own numbered releases
and SONAME.

You can find the Debian modifications here [4] and the source and built
packages in Debian unstable [5].

Pystemmer: [6]

SR

PS: I'm not subscribed to this list, so assuming it allows this post,
    please CC any replies to me.

[0]: See get-orig-source in debian/rules.
[1]: See debian/patches/shared-library.diff
[2]: See debian/patches/overrideable-cflags.diff
[3]: http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/python-modules/packages/pystemmer/trunk/debian/patches/test-exit-code.diff?view=markup
[4]: http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/collab-maint/deb-maint/snowball/trunk/
     or svn://svn.debian.org/collab-maint/deb-maint/snowball/trunk/
[5]: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/snowball/
[6]: http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/python-modules/packages/pystemmer/trunk/
     svn://svn.debian.org/python-modules/packages/pystemmer/trunk/
     http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/pystemmer/

-- 
Stefano Rivera
  http://tumbleweed.org.za/
  H: +27 21 465 6908 C: +27 72 419 8559  UCT: x3127