[Gambas-user] Debian repository

[Sebastian Kulesz]

Hi there!!

Yesterday I released a new version of a personal project. Luckily, it
gained a lot of traction. Not so luckily, a lot of Debian users commented
that they either had problems with apt complaining about gambas versions,
or the interpreter complaining about the "Bytecode too recent." error.

I provided a PPA for Ubuntu users which solves everything for them, but
Debian users are left in the dark. They have 2 options only, compile
gambas3 or use the Ubuntu PPA version corresponding to
it's Debian installation (NOT recommended at all). And those who don't know
how to do any, will complain about the official packages spitting out
errors because they are either wrongly packaged or too out of date. This
has been like this for months and contacting a maintainer is nearly
impossible. Besides, the mailing list for Gambas packagers is full of spam,
so it seems nobody is watching it.

Add to that, that the installation instructions for Debian where last
edited in June 2009!! And dates back to Gambas 1.

I don't have the time or knowledge to maintain another repository, and I
don't use Debian at all. So, what I propose is the following:

If anybody knows how, and is willing to build the source and binary
packages for supported Debian versions, and then build an apt repository
(and keep it updated), I will be more than happy to host the repository on
my server.
I have no knowledge at all on how to do this, Launchpad does it
automatically when building a package for a PPA.

Please let me know. The sooner we fix this, the better for all those devs
distributing Gambas3 apps.

Thanks!

P.S: If anybody is/knows a Debian packager, please rise an issue so this
gets fixed. A third-party repository is not the best solution, just a
temporary one.