[Lazarus] Lazarus .deb repos!

[David Emerson]

Anyone want to team up and set up a debian-style repository for 
fpc/lazarus? Read the bottom paragraph...

On Tue 13 Oct 2009, Peter Williams wrote:
> My question is this: How can I get MintUpdate to update / upgrade
> Lazarus automatically -- I suppose using repositories. Is this
> possible or not?!?

It is certainly theoretically possible, but it depends upon two things:

1. Someone has to package each new version for your distro
2. The package must be placed in a repository that you can access

since ubuntu is based on debian, mintlinux has also inherited debian's 
excellent packaging system -- you use .deb's. It would seem that 
someone on the lazarus team already makes debian-style packages, so 
step 1 is done. That means it's relatively easy to go to the 
sourceforge site and download a lazarus deb and install it using 
dpkg -i.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/
(click on Lazarus Linux i386 DEB (assuming you're on a 32-bit system) 
otherwise you'll want amd64 DEB)
or use the direct link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/Lazarus%20Linux%20i386%20DEB/Lazarus%200.9.28/lazarus_0.9.28-0.i386.deb.tar/download


There are three different ways of achieving step 2 (the "automatic" part 
of updating)
(A) The lazarus deb might be in the mint linux distros
(B) It might be in the repositories of another distro, e.g. ubuntu or 
debian
(C) There could be a dedicated repo just for fpc/lazarus

It sounds like (A) is not the case. As for (B) lazarus 0.9.28 is not yet 
in debian's unstable or experimental repos; I have no idea about 
ubuntu. Also beware of (B) because you wouldn't want to accidentally 
install other packages from another distro's repository, unless you 
really know what you are doing. These are the paths toward broken 
systems.

(C) is a nice option, particularly for fpc/laz because it doesn't depend 
on much other system stuff and is not usually very version-specific 
when it does. I would love to see an fpc+laz debian repo, and would be 
happy to help set one up if someone has a server and bandwidth 
somewhere. I don't have much experience with this, but I do have a 
little -- I've set up a trivial repo, and wrote a script to update it 
and gpg-sign it when adding new packages.

Cheers,
~David.