[maemo-community] [GSoC 09] - Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Apr 25, 2009, at 13:34, Kees Jongenburger wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Kirtika Ruchandani  
> <kirtibr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Also worth noting that we have some Zaurus people around and I/we  
>>> did look
>>> at OE
>>> for Mer but felt that we wanted more compatibility with maemo etc  
>>> to allow
>>> access to things like "Extras".
>>
>> @David:
>> Its probably  *very* premature for me to be speaking at this point  
>> about
>> this - but I fail to understand why stuff like "Extras" should be a  
>> problem
>> with OE. IMHO, OE is designed to accomodate bringing new packages  
>> easily -
>> making it just a matter writing a small bb recipe - if the distro  
>> confs are
>> well-written.  But as I said, I probably don't get your point  
>> because I
>> haven't reached that  stage in my work as yet.
>
> Debian's packaging strategy if different from OE's in the sense that
> the packaging system is intrusive.

Well, I am not sure I agree with you here. Debian has designed  
packages to be un-intrusive. In fact debian requires pristine upstream  
source and only adds a debian directory. Then you build the deb on  
your system, or it gets built on debian's architecture and you install  
the deb for your architecture, but you can always choose to build from  
source with apt-get source. I don't see how this is intrusive - in  
fact, it is one of the least intrusive types of packaging especially  
compared to an RPM.

> Therefore
> a "good" debian packages contains a source .deb package and the
> package can be created using debian tools.

The resulting deb package built from source is a binary.

>
> Many packages created for Maemo are some mix of "proper" debian
> packages , packages without corresponding sources
> and packages that with corresponding sources that can not be
> recompiled easily because the source package
> was only created as part of the debianisation.

Maemo policy currently does not _require_ sources to accompany a  
binary deb. Perhaps it should require sources to be uploaded with the  
deb?

> If the OE port is to
> support the "extras" packages it needs to support
> the binary packages "as-is(binary)". To be able to do that the OE
> build would need to have the same base package names as the Maemo
> packages(not such a big problem) but binary compatibility clearly
> would not fit in the OE strategy where the packages
> can be created for different architectures or optimized for different
> processors.

Not sure what you mean here Kees. Debian supports eight architectures  
officially, no reason why the maemo packages couldn't do the same, at  
least theoretically. We'd have to have the build sources from Nokia  
and a host of architectures to build them on, but still, it could be  
done.

> In short it most certainly is hard to achieve this. The "easy" thing
> is to find the sources and create a bb file for it and that is extra
> work. So it is hard to make use of all the great packages created to
> maemo-proper. Mer is very close to achieving that goal

Mer is an excellent solution to this problem. Plus it has a hard  
working, dedicated community already with a proven, released product.  
This is what should be supported and extended IMHO.

Jeremiah