On Tue, 2008-04-08 at 14:34 -0500, heathenx wrote:
My problem was that I didn't know who to contact regarding making a package specific to my distribution. Within the Inkscape development community, are there point people from other distributions that you guys contact for this sort of thing? I think we can almost guarantee Ubuntu packages will be built right away but what about the openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, and Debian crowd, just to name a few? Perhaps this is why the autopackages are built?
This is something that I have always been curious about.
Usually every distribution has someone who takes care of packaging for their specific distribution. While Inkscape as a project tries to work with these folks and make sure their lives are easy, many of them aren't involved with Inkscape or on the mailing lists. Most distributions (I'm not sure about all) usually have a way to submit a bug on the package in a way to show that an upstream version is available and not packaged. I'd submit that bug to them.
Also, I'd say that we'd prefer if you'd start submitting bugs when the pre-releases start. One of the goals of the pre-releases is to ensure that packagers have everything they need in the tarballs to do their jobs. If they don't package them, we don't get that very important feedback from the pre-releases.
Ubuntu sometimes seems to be favored because there several people who are active in the Inkscape community who are also active in the Ubuntu community. That isn't our intention, and we'd love for other distros to get more involved in the Inkscape community, it just happens to be the way things are today.
--Ted