presage accepted in Debian

Some time ago, I began working on packaging presage for Debian. My motivations were:

• to make presage as easily and readily accessible as possible: getting presage into Debian certainly achieves widespread distribution, as it make it available to Debian distribution itself, as well as the numerous Debian derivatives (Ubuntu arguably being the most well-known)
• to learn about packaging software for Debian: I was curious and interested about the policies and processes adopted by Debian developers to package software into the distribution, and I wanted to learn the tools and procedures for myself
• to contribute something back to Debian: I've used Debian as my main OS for years (after a brief initial stint with Slackware 1.2.3), and I thought it high time to contribute some time and work to the distribution and the community of developers behind it

I am glad to announce that presage has been accepted into Debian Sid. presage-0.8.6-1 was built, signed, and uploaded on Sat, 6 August 2011.

As this is the first upload of the presage package, it was moved to the new/ directory, where it waited for approval by the ftpmasters. Once the package was accepted, I got a confirmation mail and the "Intent To Package" bug was closed.

The auto-builders then started crunching away to recompile presage on the various architectures. The package is now installed in the Debian archive for all officially supported architectures.

Presage has also been built and installed on some of the debian ports architectures.

So, from now on, you are only a simple command away from using presage on any Debian installation:

`apt-get install presage'

or you might want to try out the GTK+ predictive text editor `gprompter' with:

`apt-get install gprompter'

or maybe the wxPython predictive text editor `pyprompter' with:

`apt-get install pyprompter'

Here are the binary packages that are currently built from the presage source package... you get the drift:

gprompter - intelligent predictive GTK+ text editor
libpresage-data - intelligent predictive text entry platform (data files)
libpresage-dev - intelligent predictive text entry platform (development files)
libpresage-doc - intelligent predictive text entry platform (documentation)
libpresage1 - intelligent predictive text entry platform (shared library)
presage - intelligent predictive text entry platform (tools and demos)
pyprompter - intelligent predictive wxPython text editor
python-presage - intelligent predictive text entry platform (Python binding)