[mosh-devel] Mosh fixes

[Keith Winstein]

Hi Christine,

Here is a mosh package for your review: http://mosh-debian.xvm.mit.edu/mosh/

It builds with pbuilder on Debian unstable.

Please let me know if there are any problems or, if not, please upload
to Debian!

It should work (modulo not having Kerberos tickets or AFS tokens after
login) against the mosh-server on Athena, with:

$ mosh linux.mit.edu --server='athrun mosh_project mosh-server'

Best, and thank you,
Keith

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Keith Winstein <keithw at mit.edu> wrote:
> Thanks Christine.
>
> If the lambdas are this big of an obstacle, I guess I will just
> rewrite them in less adventurous C++. It's not worth the hassle and
> there's only like 10 of them anyway.
>
> Once I get that done and the man pages (which should be a couple
> days), I will ping you again about uploading to Debian.
>
> Thanks again,
> Keith
>
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Christine Spang <christine at spang.cc> wrote:
>> 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