[maemo-community] Maemo / Nokia might want to take advantage of debian's potential new build system

[From: David Greaves]

Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> On Apr 21, 2009, at 23:06, David Greaves wrote:
>> Jeremiah Foster wrote:
>>> This projects aims to build a more efficient automated build system
>>> for debian's infrastructure. Maybe there are ideas and code to take
>>> and use on maemo.org.
>> :D
>>
>> Try this:
>>  http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service/
> 
> I have looked at this previously and think it is a great idea. I am  
> not convinced that I want my software sitting around on Novell's  
> servers though. I think they are a little confused about free software.

3 points:
* OBS is completely GPL
* so... a setup of obs.maemo.org is encouraged (I intend to setup a local OBS here)
* Suse/Novell are providing a very valuable and free service to the OSS
community. There is zero tie-in just a 165 strong server farm.

Novell's "confusion" is important but, IMHO, not relevant here.

>> Someone else has been looking at it too:
>>  https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=Maemo%3A4.1
> 
> Ditto, plus this page asks me for a login. FAIL.

I didn't realise the page needed a login; but really... "FAIL". Maybe you could
look a _little_ deeper.

The OBS guys are aware that their ties to Suse/Novell make it sound like a
builder for a single distro. However it isn't.

It builds for:
* Debian
* openSUSE
* SLES
* Fedora
* RHEL
* CentOS
* Mandriva
* Ubuntu
and now:
* Mer
and lots more...

on
* armv5el
* i586
* ia64
* ppc
* ppc64
* x86_64

and it builds *all* the packages (as in the entire distro) for the offical SUSE
repos.

OBS is more a VM/chroot manger that runs each distro's own packaging and build
software. It supports Xen/KVM/Qemu/chroot.

So for Debian it does an apt-get build-essential, pulls all the build-depends
and then runs dpkg-buildpkg. Similarly for other distros.

Oh, it also provides a working local buildservice that doesn't need scratchbox
hacks.

> I think the Debian SoC project might provide a more modern, and  
> hopefully robust, build system implemented in a language that Maemo  
> uses (python)
Mmm "decision by language".

> that can be moved to a local server as opposed to queued  
> in Novell's build system.
As can OBS.

> It is the entire chain of automated tools  
> that is so complex and hard to manage - having an easier system would  
> be a huge win for the community even if it is behind the scenes.
Agree. Would you agree that it's good to find a mature solution with a solid and
funded team behind it then?

As I said, Suse eat their own dogfood - OBS is used to build the released SUSE
distros.

IMNSHO the SoC project is vapourware and/or a NIH toy by comparison :)

I admit I am biased - I thought Mer needed something to use as a builder and
when I found OBS met our needs I began using it. Mer 0.13 will hopefully come
from OBS and I'm now running Qt4.5 from OBS on Mer on my N800.

David


-- 
"Don't worry, you'll be fine; I saw it work in a cartoon once..."