From girish at hri.res.in  Thu Apr  9 00:32:18 2009
From: girish at hri.res.in (Girish Kulkarni)
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:02:18 +0530
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Debian
Message-ID: <8a2141c0904082132g4a0bd3cdpb08ea498ce37b900@mail.gmail.com>

Hi List,

I wonder why package alexandria is still 0.6.1 in Debian (even in
unstable).  I'd imagine the package maintainer (Daffydd Harries) would
know about the new releases, as is evident from his QA page:

http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=daf%40debian.org

Girish.

From cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org  Thu Apr  9 01:58:14 2009
From: cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org (Cathal Mc Ginley)
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 2009 06:58:14 +0100
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Debian
In-Reply-To: <8a2141c0904082132g4a0bd3cdpb08ea498ce37b900@mail.gmail.com>
References: <8a2141c0904082132g4a0bd3cdpb08ea498ce37b900@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20090409065814.4d91c48e@kate>

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On Thu, 9 Apr 2009 10:02:18 +0530
Girish Kulkarni <girish at hri.res.in> wrote:

> Hi List,
> 
> I wonder why package alexandria is still 0.6.1 in Debian (even in
> unstable).  I'd imagine the package maintainer (Daffydd Harries) would
> know about the new releases, as is evident from his QA page:
> 
> http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=daf%40debian.org
 
That list shows Alexandria as a "package with a newer upstream
release", but that status message is generated automatically (the
debian 'watch' file for the package keeps an eye on the project's
RubyForge release page). 

I don't know why the package hasn't been updated, but it may be due to
the fact that I inadvertently made Alexandria harder to package for
Debian when I started making changes to the project's build process
before the 0.6.2 release.

After reading (in the last few months) lots of Debian "Maintainer"
documentation, I *do* know that the way I added "deb file" support to
Alexandria's Rakefile back then was the wrong way to go about it. Not
being a Debian user myself, I had thought that the most important thing
was to create a valid deb file - so I looked up the technical specs for
the deb file format and wrote rake tasks to build debs (using dpkg-deb)
from within the Rakefile. 

In fact, the correct approach is to craft, separately, all the
packaging files found in the debian/ directory, so that valid deb files
can be created using the canonical Debian dh_make tools (that way, the
source package is comprehensible to other Debian developers, and they
can easily debug problems, make changes, and take over maintenance if
needed). Of course, Daffyd had already done this work for 0.6.1...

So, in the near future, I'm going to remove the 'rake debian:deb' task
from Alexandria, and ensure the packaging files in 
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/debian
are in order, and produce a valid package from the current version of
Alexandria. Once that's done, I'll get in touch with Daffydd Harries and
see if we can get the package updated in Debian (Unstable).


   -   Cathal.
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From cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org  Tue Apr 21 17:55:05 2009
From: cathal.alexandria at gnostai.org (Cathal Mc Ginley)
Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:55:05 +0100
Subject: [Alexandria-list] Palatina : a publication collection manager
Message-ID: <20090421225505.1be45685@kate>

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Regulars on the alexandria-list may have heard me going on about the
'experimental' code I've been working on to implement more complex
features than Alexandria can handle at the moment. Well, I figure it's
about time I show you what I'm talking about.

    http://palatina.gnostai.org/

Palatina is a ground-up re-write of the non-GUI part of Alexandria. It
deals with the core domain issues surrounding catalogues and
collections of books (but it is also capable of being extended to
handle Journals, CDs, DVDs and other types of publication).

The current code (available from my git repository) is just a small
beginning: you can manually create Book objects with complex properties
or create them by searching the web-based MetaData Sources (such
as Amazon, AdLibris etc.). There is also a very simple
(proof-of-concept, really) database store. There's more info at the web
site, and there's also a Wiki where I'll be sketching requirements and
notes on the design.

You have already seen some beneficial effects of Palatina; all but two
of the web-based 'providers' in Alexandria 0.6.4.1 are back-ports from
the MetaData Sources I wrote for Palatina.

At the moment, the code is still quite experimental, and might change
about a lot in the near future. However, I'd appreciate it if anyone
had any comments to make about the design. I've tried to follow the
rules of "Domain-Driven Design" (ISBN: 0-321-12521-5).  In spite
of the mad complexity right at the core (the Node class) I think that
for creating and manipulating Book objects, the Palatina library is
actually much easier to use than Alexandria.

Anyway, now you know where my time has been going. But I will still
work on pushing out a 0.6.5 bugfix release for Alexandria in a few
weeks.

   -   Cathal Magus
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