README.Packagers

Notes for package maintainers
-----------------------------


About this file
---------------
The following notes are intended for package maintainers. These are not
meant as strict rules but only as hints and ideas to make a package
maintainer's life a little bit easier.
So it doesn't make much sense to include this file in any created
packages for general distribution.


Packaging hints
---------------
If the final file size of the created packaged is a problem, you might
ignore some files and don't package them or put them into a separate
package. This can be easily done (without any further complications)
with the translations files(files in %prefix/share/locale/).
Another possibility is to skip the tags files in the data/ subdirectory.
These are only for auto completion of global symbols. If the files are
missing Geany just doesn't provide these global symbol auto completion
but all other things will work anyways.
You can also skip packaging the full HTML documentation including
images. But if you do so, please include at least the text form of the
manual.
What you shouldn't skip in your package: the filetype.* files in the
data/ subdirectory, these files are important. If they are missing,
Geany still has a fallback mechanism for syntax highlighting (if
filetypes.common is installed) but several other features for certain
filetypes will fail (mainly build support).


Testing your package
--------------------
There are a few things to take care of when you create a package:
- Please check whether you include the following files:
  ScintillaLicense.txt, README, manual.txt, COPYING.
  ScintillaLicense.txt is the name of the installed file in the doc/
  directory. In the source distribution, this file can be found in
  scintilla/License.txt.
  The file COPYING is the GPLv2 license text and should(have to?) be
  included in your package.
- Start Geany after it was installed out of your package. Pass the
  command line argument "-v" to see whether Geany complains about
  missing files.
- Check whether the help menu item (Help->Help or F1) works and opens
  the local installed HTML documentation in your browser (if it opens
  the manual on the website you didn't install the HTML manual correctly
  and Geany falls back to the online manual).
- Check the About dialog (Help->About) whether it displays the full
  GPLv2 license text on the last tab("License").


Feedback
--------
If you have to modify anything to package the Geany sources for your
distribution/target and these changes might be generally useful, please
report your changes to us(the Geany developers) so we can apply them.
Such changes could be removing/adding any files, modifying the autotools
configuration, any modifications to some "meta" files (like
geany.desktop, geany.spec, images/icons, ...) or even if you have to
modify the source code to fix broken compilation or something like this.
Please inform us about changes you made, so maybe you don't have to
change it again with the next release and we can fix it in Geany itself
so others could also benefit from these changes.


Announce your packages
---------------------
After finishing your package creation, feel free to drop a note on
Geany's mailing list or directly to us (the Geany developers) to
inform us about it. If you wish, we can also add a link on Geany's
website to your package.


Geany announcements
-------------------
Package maintainers are encouraged to subscribe to the Geany mailing
list to stay informed about major changes and of course, new releases.



--
2008-2012 by Enrico Tröger, Nick Treleaven, Colomban Wendling, Matthew Brush and Frank Lanitz
enrico(dot)troeger(at)uvena(dot)de
nick(dot)treleaven(at)btinternet(dot)com
lists(dot)ban(at)herbesfolles(dot)org
mbrush(at)codebrainz(dot)ca
frank(at)frank(dot)uvena(dot)de