[mosh-devel] Mosh fixes

[Christine Spang]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 03:44:54AM -0500, Keith Winstein wrote:
> Christine, I think I am getting close to where this is ready to go
> into Debian, with your help. Can you please advise on the best
> workflow?
> 
> Right now I have Launchpad building a PPA for Ubuntu and grabbing
> automatically from Github, which has all the packaging.
> (https://github.com/keithw/mosh or
> http://ppa.launchpad.net/keithw/mosh/ubuntu/). The repo has a
> ./build-package.sh that builds an Ubuntu package. What's the best way
> to proceed while the software is still in flux?

You'll need to add a changelog entry for Debian when building a package
for Debian. It's the same as for Ubuntu except you'll use the
distribution name 'unstable', and no -ubuntu in the version string.
Other than that the build script works just fine.

Once the package is in Debian unstable, it will automatically be synced
into Ubuntu universe as long as it's not after the Debian import freeze
of Ubuntu's release cycle (I believe it is currently after this deadline
for Precise).

I don't know what best practices are for sharing a changelog between
Debian and Ubuntu. After mosh is in Debian, though, you could use Debian
as the single point of upload. You would prepare the package as usual,
and ping me or some other Debian developer to sign and upload the
package when it's ready. (Ideally you should be testing the build on a
Debian unstable chroot beforehand.) After doing this a few times, you
could get your key added to the Debian maintainer keyring for mosh and
be able to make the upload directly.

I think it is fine to upload the package to Debian unstable while it's
"still in flux" if it's stable enough to be usable and if having it
available in the archive gets you testers. We can always file an RC bug
against it to prevent it from migrating to testing until it's ready to
end up in a stable Debian release.

On another note, I spent some time trying to backport mosh to squeeze so
I could test the packages using my laptop to log in to my server, and
it turns out that GCC 4.4, which is squeeze's GCC, doesn't support
lambda. :(

http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/cxx0x_status.html

The mosh codebase uses this in a few places, e.g.:

git grep "\\[&\\]"

If we want to support squeeze and similarly aged distros (even including
RHEL 6), we'll need to work around this. Otherwise it will be probably
about a year until Debian stable can run mosh, probably more for RHEL.
Which seems like a pretty big barrier to adoption.

Christine