Since the release of LedgerSMB v.1.5.8, which dropped the requirement for App::LedgerSMB::Admin, I have been working on finishing the Debian packaging for the new version, for both the ledgersmb package for Debian itself as well as the new ledgersmb-1.5 package which is just for release by our project. Note that the git packaging repositories for both are at GitHub [1][2]. This email is to start a discussion as necessary regarding the packaging, starting with some notes about how it's proceeding.
The intent of the debian/watch file plus the get-orig-source target in debian/rules is to provide a way to automatically create an *.orig.tar.gz file, especially for when new versions of LedgerSMB comes out. Using that, the process will check for a new version. If one is found; it will download the new archive as well as its associated *.asc pgp signature file. Then verify the pgp signature against the downloaded archive. Then repack it as necessary (needed for ledgersmb, possibly also useful for ledgesmb-1.5) if the verification is good. This had been working for both packages prior to the move from SourceForge. I've been able to do some updating for the debian/watch file (just in ledgersmb-1.5, so far) but not to where I can get the verification step to work properly, although it does find the new version in the new location at GitHub. (In order to proceed with the packaging, I manually downloaded and verified the new 1.5.8 version.)
One big difference between LSMB v1.4.x and v1.5.x is that LedgerSMB is now being run by Starman instead of by Apache; this is more an issue for the ledgersmb package since it needs to also handle upgrades from v1.4.x. I originally thought to handle the choice between which web proxy to use, Apache or Nginx, by asking a question about it during the package install and then proceeding from there. To that end, I added a debconf question about it which defaults to 'None'. However, I could not figure a way to take advantage of that selection during the package install in order to get either apache or nginx to be installed as necessary. So what I've ended up doing (and am in the process of testing with the ledgersmb-1.5 package) is adding the creation of additional binary packages that provide for the installation and configuration for apache or nginx and those depend on the main package. (I wonder if they should be made mutually exclusive...) That debconf question about a web proxy selection is not needed now and will likely be removed.