LDC blacklisted in Ubuntu

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 20/09/12 19:04, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Thursday, 20 September 2012 at 17:26:25 UTC, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>> Some rather urgent news: LDC has just been blacklisted in Ubuntu.
>
> It is not really news, as the LDC version in the Debian repo has not been
> updated for ages.

It's not news that the package is out of date, but it _is_ news that the package 
has been blacklisted, and very unwelcome news, because it could make it much 
more difficult to get an updated package included.

> But yes, it would definitely be important to have an LDC
> package in as many distribution repos as possible.

I'd add here that you're talking about by far the most widely used distro.

> As far as I see, we would at the very least need somebody to maintain the
> Debian/Ubuntu packages for this. Unfortunately, nobody on the core dev team uses
> Ubuntu for their daily work, or has other experiences with Debian packages.
>
> It would be great if somebody from the D community experienced in packaging
> could jump in to help us on this front. We'd be happy to help with any
> questions, and I don't think the packaging process should be particularly
> difficult (LDC builds fine on Ubuntu, and Arch and Fedora are already shipping
> recent versions). The thing is just that creating good packages for a system you
> are not intimately familiar with is quite hard, and we are already chronically
> lacking manpower anyway.

Isn't it worth someone from the LDC team discussing with the Ubuntu people 
concerned (e.g. the person who decided to blacklist the package) and try and get 
their feedback and advice on packaging?  My experience is that the Ubuntu team 
are fairly friendly and helpful.

AFAICS the reason this situation has arisen is because you've got a bug on 
Launchpad that never got communicated as far as the LDC devs.  Opening that 
channel of communication could help prevent something like this happening again.