Packaging Yii Framework

[Paul McEnery]

Hi.

I am looking for some advice with regard to packaging the PHP Yii
Framework. I already maintain two Debian packages, and would like to
package Yii Framework as I am using it for a project that I am working
on. This appears to be a package which much like Ruby On Rails; is not
actually used in any way by the deployed application. I.e. once
deployed, all the required components have been copied into the
specified web root. For example, a webapp can be deployed as follows
from the extracted framework source:

./yiic webapp /var/www

Once deployed, the yiic command line utility expects to carry out
activities in the current working directory (i.e. inside the webapp
directory itself).

I have the following questions which I hope someone will be able to help with:

1.
Is it sensible to bother packaging such an application? I think the
answer to this is "yes". Anything you can install as part of the
distribution (possibly adapted to better suit to that distro) has to
be a good thing. This includes automatic integrity checks etc...

2.
Assuming that it's worth the effort, what is the best approach? My
first guess is to install the framework source to
/usr/share/<pkg_name>, and symlink /usr/bin/yiic to
/usr/share/<pkg_name>/yiic

3.
Naming convention. The upstream tarball is named yii-x.x.x.tar.gz, and
the documentation is yii-docs-x.x.x.tar.gz. Is this a good candidate
for the new multiple source tarball support in DebSrc3.0? My initial
thoughts are to have a source package called yii, which provides yii
and yii-docs? I noticed the PHP draft policy looked a bit sparse in
this area ;) I thought I'd at lease clear this up before filing the
ITP...

Any advice and/or discussion would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Paul.

[Tanguy Ortolo]

Hello Paul.

I am just a newbie packager, but here is some advice, to be taken with
care...

Post by Paul McEnery
2.
Assuming that it's worth the effort, what is the best approach? My
first guess is to install the framework source to
/usr/share/<pkg_name>, and symlink /usr/bin/yiic to
/usr/share/<pkg_name>/yiic

Why not installing it directly to /usr/bin/yiic?

Post by Paul McEnery
3.
Naming convention. The upstream tarball is named yii-x.x.x.tar.gz, and
the documentation is yii-docs-x.x.x.tar.gz. Is this a good candidate
for the new multiple source tarball support in DebSrc3.0? My initial
thoughts are to have a source package called yii, which provides yii
and yii-docs?

If you have two upstream tarballs, and want to make two binary packages,
with a bijective mapping between them, I think you should rather make
two source packages
 :-)