[Snowball-discuss] Shared Library? Releases?

[Stefano Rivera]

In reply to my mail from last year:

> 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.

You don't need to do anything here, except note that we'd quite like
upstream source releases containing something like this tarball:
http://cdn.debian.net/debian/pool/main/s/snowball/snowball_0+svn527.orig.tar.gz

> 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?

Try this patch:

http://people.debian.org/~stefanor/upstream/snowball-shared-library.patch

> 3. Snowball doesn't include a COPYING file in the source, although
>    pystemmer does, so we cribbed from there.

Please clarify that this is correct: (The Files: * block is all that's
important to you)
http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/s/snowball/current/copyright

Please include a LICENCE / COPYING in future source releases of
snowball.

> 4. -Iinclude is really a CPPFLAG. Moving it there allows CFLAGS to be
>    overridden.

http://people.debian.org/~stefanor/upstream/snowball-flags.patch

> 5. Pystemmer's test suite doesn't return an error code if there were
>    errors. [3]

http://people.debian.org/~stefanor/upstream/pystemmer-test-exit-code.patch

> 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.

Numbered releases, with some sort of announcements, would be great.
At the moment, I just go and look at your SVN repo, every now and
then...

Thanks,

SR

-- 
Stefano Rivera
  http://tumbleweed.org.za/
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