I've started packaging therion and am begining to understand how it goes together. I have a fundamental question to ask before I do much more: Do the upstream authors (that Stacho and Martin) want this to be a native debian package or not? In a normal package there is the tarball I get from upstream, then there is a set of debian patches that are applied to it to make it fit the debian path and rules and add a debian 'control' file (really a makefile) that makes sure the package can be built in the right way so it will work on autobuilders. In a native debian package there is no patch to make these changes - the control files are in the normal tarball. Survex is done this way. It is entirely up to you guys which way we do this. A native package is simpler and is slightly less work overall, but it does move some responsibility for making the build-process work right from me to you, and you may not want to do that, or not yet. In practice it mostly means adding a /debian dir that I supply, and maybe some build-process changes if necessary. Tell me what you think. In a week or so I expect I'll send you the first version to look at. Wookey -- Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679 work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/ play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/