[Alexandria-list] 0.6.3 Plans

[Joseph Method]

On Jan 28, 2008 1:54 AM, Cathal Mc Ginley
<cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org> wrote:
> I suppose what I really mean is "What is the Debian way?"
> (Unfortunately, we no longer have a Debian packager on the project who
> can advise us in matters of the Debian Policy. But I *think* that
> solving this issue with a virtual package would be contrary to
> the policy.)

Honestly, I feel Debian Policy is sometimes bizarre, but I may be
wrongheaded about this. Relevant sections is here:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html (3.6 Virtual
Packages). They do seem to feel that virtual packages are for offering
different versions of the same package (like totem-gstreamer vs.
totem-xine), so you're probably right.

> Once we set up our own deb repository (or when we get the latest
> version of Alexandria back into Debian) we can just modify the
> installation instructions we give to achieve this outcome. At the
> moment our instructions are to run 'dpkg --install alexandria.deb';
> optional dependencies are not automatically loaded, or even suggested.
> (This was the problem recently encountered by Jack Myrseth, it seems.) I
> just think the problem might fix itself when most of our users are
> installing Alexandria via deb repositories.

Okay, I see. With the Launchpad repository, we should anticipate the
instructions being either `sudo apt-get install alexandria` or `go to
Add/Remove programs...`. Add/Remove programs does use Synaptic and
dpkg (dpkg --status-fd 50 --unpack --auto-deconfigure $file). We can
test again to see if recommends get installed when the time comes, and
if so, this is indeed the solution.

> What I was thinking was that this particular location (GladeBase) would
> be a good area to hook into some graphical exception handler,
> explaining to the user that an unexpected error occurred and providing
> the same stack-trace and version information that a crash report does -
> just without having to terminate the program. This would make it easier
> for the user to report the error to us.

I agree. We should have a good graphical exception popup window and
work on meaningful error messages. We should even have a last-resort
"This application is going to crash now. This shouldn't happen. Please
report!" popup.
-- 
-J. Method