Re: [gentoo-dev] About writing ebuild files

[George Shapovalov <georges@its.caltech.edu>]

Hi

On Sunday 23 June 2002 15:27, Markus Wagner wrote:
> Do I have to put my name and mailaddress into the maintainer entry in the
> comments or is this an entry for the gentoo people?
Author and Maintainer entries in the ebuilds are discouraged and will be 
stripped out as of present. Instead information of such kind should go into 
Changelog. Please take a look at skel.Changelog for the format description. 
Every person making modification is supposed to update this file (and include 
his/her name and email).
This way you as an author will get proper credit for ebuild submission, core 
developer will get his credit for processing/cleaning up your submission and 
a person updating the ebuild will get his due.

> May I update an ebuild file originally written by a different person?
> What's then about the maintainer entry?
Yes, all the ebuilds are released under GPL-2 (see the header for release 
note). See above Re: maintainer entry.

> I've written a port for cyrus-imapd-2.0.16. Unfortunately this package
> needs a user called "cyrus", which doesn't exist in the default profile.
> What to do in this situation?
You can execute adduser command from pkg_preinst. You might want to add 
corresponding deluser entry to pkg_postremove.
However I am not sure if this is a desirable way to do so or rather should 
user addition be left to sysadmin (still probably not a very elegant solution 
as a few files likely need to be chowned). On the other hand you might prefer 
other username for this package - in case this is covered by any standart.

> How should the delivered /etc/services looks like, if I have to create some
> new entries in it? Should it only contain the new entries or perhaps some
> standard entries plus the new ones?
I think you should include complete file and install it in the proper place. 
As long as it is installed in CONFIG_PROTECTed dir it does not overwrite 
installed version but rather gets a specially mangled name.

George