Awesome! :-)
This sounds like we are very close now! Excellent work, thank you!
Already in Jessie? Whoa!
Who decides if a (stable) makes it into a repo? Like, would any program be accepted? Or is there an entry limit to only have programs which will be used by many people, or the like?
Normally, Armory depends on bitcoin-core. Which is not in the repos. How is that dealt with?
Probably not at all, as Armory works in offline mode too, without bitcoin-core installed? So I guess bitcoin-core is not listed as dependency in the to-be Armory package?
Ente
It is not already in Jessie, but it should be soon.
If you want a program in Debian, you file a RFP (Request for Package) (only if someone has not already filed a RFP for that program). That lets people know that there is someone interested in seeing the program packaged. See
here for more information. You can use the reportbug tool or email
submit@bugs.debian.org. Ideally more than one person would like to see the program in Debian, since someone is going to have to take the time to maintain the program in Debian, and there is already a lot of software in Debian. People can reply to your RFP to express their interest.
If someone is interested in packaging a program for Debian, they file an ITP (Intent to Package). Either they change the title of an existing RFP to ITP or they file a new ITP if no RFP exists.
Once an ITP is filed, you work on the package. I can go into more detail if you are interested. Once you are done with the package, you need a sponsor who is a Debian Developer to review it and upload it to the Debian archive. Then the package goes through the process in my last post. Note that packages always start out in unstable (sid), progress to testing (currently Jessie), and then, once a new release happens, go to stable (currently Wheezy).
If you want to see all the RFP and ITP bugs, you can check out
http://wnpp.debian.net/. It also includes ITA (Intent to Adopt), O (Orphaned, meaning the maintainer has abandoned a package), RFA (Request for Adoption, meaning the maintainer wants someone else to maintain), and RFH (Request for Help, meaning the maintainer wants a co-maintainer). Any orphaned packages not adopted will be dropped from the next release (Jessie).
There are some RFPs for other Bitcoin software. There is Multibit and Bitcoinj, but Multibit needs Bitcoinj first, and it looks like nobody is working on Bitcoinj. There is also a Bitcoin trading application called Bitcointrader.
Armory doesn't technically depend on Bitcoin Core, because it runs without Bitcoin Core, so it is not listed as a dependency for the package. Bitcoin Core is available as part of Debian, but it is only in unstable and is split into bitcoin-qt and bitcoind. The reason it is only in unstable is
this bug. Essentially they filed a critical bug to prevent bitcoin-qt and bitcoind from migrating to testing, because they don't want Bitcoin Core in the stable release, because then it would get outdated. It is okay to be in unstable, because then the maintainers can release a new version and it would go directly to unstable, unlike stable, which would only get updated when there is a new version of Debian. We feel like Armory doesn't have the same issues, since it offloads the network communication work to Bitcoin Core. So we don't have to worry about network consensus issues. So we can have Armory in testing and stable.
