Tuesday
I had a BBC meeting in Berkeley with Nick, and I fixed the way packages whose best upstream source is Debian are handled. This turns out to be pretty straightforward, because gar is powerful enough to handle a gzipped patch downloaded from the Debian pool. So pax is a pretty canonical example of how this is done. bsd-finger and procps are other examples. I am glossing over the still-unexplained fact that pax and procps require WORKSRC to be changed by means of the addition of ".orig", where bsd-finger works fine with the default value of WORKSRC.
Conceivably, we could have a script called use-gnu-upstream which would produce a basic Makefile for a GNU package called foo, and a similar script called use-debian-upstream which would do the same thing for a Debian package called foo. So if you wanted to add GNU hello to the BBC, you could then start with
mkdir utils/hello cvs add utils/hello cd utils/hello use-gnu-upstream hello
and then customize the resulting Makefile. use-gnu-upstream and use-debian-upstream would have to check (using standardized rules) for the most current upstream package versions available at ftp.gnu.org and ftp.debian.org, respectively.
