Redland and Debian Packaging

Phew! My RDF/XML parser raptor (a C library, depends on libxml and cURL) has been in Debian sid/unstable for a few months now so it was time to attempt the big beast, redland. That's my main RDF system and as well as the C library, it has 6 other language interfaces - perl, python, ruby, java, tcl, php and I'm working on CLI/C#.

This list has felt a bit daunting for me to deal with, however after the raptor experience I was confident the C library part would at least be straightforward. Over the last 4 days I've added some of the languages slowly, while studying the mysteries of the Debian perl and python policies. To that I've added waiting for sid/unstable to be buildable so I can use pbuilder to check that I have all the correct dependencies, and decoding various packages to see how they did things.

So the current state is that I've got the C (and -dev), perl, python and ruby debian packages building without error in pbuilder, "lintian clean" and working once installed. The next step is to see about getting them into sid/unstable when my very busy sponsor edd has enough time to check them.