LottaNZB

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m sorry that it has been so silent in LottaNZB’s development blog during the past months. VuDu, thanks to whom LottaNZB is available in Portuguese, encouraged me to actually keep you updated, even though I’m not used to blogging at all. Wonder if this will change in the coming months.

As you can tell by the title of this blog post, we’ve got some great news! After our disappointing, non-existent efforts of bringing LottaNZB into the Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid repositories, there’s finally some progress we can tell you about. In order to avoid duplicate work and because it’s not a good idea to only focus on a single derivative of Debian, I decided to address myself to the Debian project. After having registered LottaNZB at mentors.debian.net Jonathan Wiltshire provided me with numerous helpful comments about how to make the LottaNZB package more ready for the Debian repositories and pointed me out to the Debian Python Applications Packaging Team (PAPT). I finally got in touch with the Debian developer Piotr Ożarowski, who was so kind to polish and upload the package. Thanks to him, I learned numerous things about how to create high-quality Debian packages (conditional dependencies, handy dh_* tools in rules, which replace our own postinst script, etc.). I was highly impressed with how carefully the copyright and licensing questions need to be treated. For example, we weren’t sure if the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) we use for LottaNZB’s documentation is allowed in Debian’s repositories (it is, as of 2006). The LottaNZB package is now listed in Debian’s NEW queue. It might take some time until it’s finally possible to successfully run “sudo apt-get install lottanzb” on Debian machines. Since Ubuntu’s DebianImportFreeze has already taken effect, it looks like there’s no other way than making a sync request. If all goes well, LottaNZB should also be available in Ubuntu Jaunty. For those who’d like to always use the latest LottaNZB version, we might consider creating a PPA. We’ll keep you updated about that. It’s kind of a good feeling to know that LottaNZB will soon join ten thousands of other Open Source applications that together form the GNU/Linux ecosystem we love so much. And it’s also encouraging to continue the development. LottaNZB is older than a year now. We’re sorry to have missed to celebrate its birthday.