> Hi,
> 
> This is to let everyone here know that the Debian packaging of the Coda 
> client and server have now been installed into the archives. You should 
> soon be able to find the packages in project/experimental on your Debian 
> mirror.
>
> I would very much appreciate if those of you who have access to Debian 
> systems could test the packages out and let me know of any problems.

Hi Anders,

Well, I'm the Debian advocate in the coda-group. However, I haven't been
able to persuade anyone into using Debian. Mainly because all our 55+
machines are a maintainers headache already (Imagine a mix of i386 with 
RedHat, FreeBSD, NetBSD (both with stable and unstable kernels), 2 alpha's,
a couple of Sparcstations, and 1 guy to make sure we have `bleeding edge' 
software and all security holes are plugged.

(I know, with a debian installation we get all this easily, that's exactly
what I've been saying, but who listens????)

Now to the serious points,

I've looked at the packages (4.6.1-1), here a a couple of notes:

The source-diff doesn't seem to include anything else but CVS-related 
differences. (Which is another religous war I'm fighting here, we should
not have CVS crap in out tarballs, but those same tarballs are used to 
install on our own (new) systems, so that changes can easily be committed)
 
I saw you didn't have man-pages in coda-doc or coda-client/server, I
believe that in the redhat packages they are present in the coda-doc.rpm's.
Yes, we should release tarball's for the documentation too.

I really like the pre/post installation scripts. That's something I never
got to in my own packaging (Yes, I've done some debian packages as of 
coda-4.1.3, see http://www.cwi.nl/~jaharkes/coda/, I never released them
since both the packaging and coda were not ready for prime-time)

I noticed how you got around the stupid hardcoded path's to /usr/coda,
does your setup actually work (have to try that), especially with the
DATA and LOG rvm files? We are planning to move things to more standard
places (/var/cache/coda, etc.)

You might want to replace /usr/sbin/venus-setup with what you've got in the
post-install (and then even call that from the post-install?). As the current
one is definitively trying to do too much for a debian installation.

The server package has got something strange, the directories /backup, /db,
/srv, /vol, /bin, and /auth2 should be /vice/backup, etc. 

As a quick side-note, we've gotten the official IANA assigned port-numbers, 
and are planning to release an severly incompatible version, all clients and 
servers older than 4.6.4 (or 5) will not in any way be able to communicate 
with the ones in the new release. As the /etc/services in debian is located in 
another package, it might be useful to `synchronize' this update (or making 
sure that netbase is up-to-date before coda-* leaves project/experimental.

> Regards,
> /Anders - Debian maintainer of the Coda packages

See you later,
	Jan Harkes <jaharkes_at_cs.cmu.edu>