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

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Apr 27, 2009, at 8:36, Ed Bartosh wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 2009/4/27 Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> ext Jeremiah Foster wrote:
>>> This points to a good data point for the OBS. Plus the more hackers
>>> work on it the better it gets. It's GPL, and relocatable. I agree  
>>> that
>>> maemo should take a serious look at implementing it. Hmmm, I suppose
>>> that might even be my job? Should I put that on the sprint page?  
>>> What
>>> do people think?
>>
>> An online build system is a quite a big discussion topic that Maemo  
>> is
>> considering for the future. I already asked for OBS feedback months  
>> ago
>> and I met the core developers at FOSDEM. Such online build system
>> (Novell's or anything else) could be part of something bigger, not  
>> only
>> to be used by Maemo application developers.
>>
>> I recommend you not to invest much time on this and rather go to more
>> immediate work on supporting those developers in the short term with
>> better documentation and direct help.
>>
> I agree with Quim.

I have been working on maemian which addresses these issues directly  
and will generate data on why packages are not building and hopefully  
how to fix that.
>
>> For instance, there are many apps in Fremantle extras-devel that do  
>> not
>> install, and we have no (common) idea of the quality of the  
>> packages in
>> that repository. One task could be to see what are the main issues  
>> and
>> common mistakes and start addressing them to ease the path for the  
>> new
>> developers that will be involved for the first time in Maemo  
>> development
>> and perhaps also Debian packaging.
>>
>
> BTW, why we're looking at other solutions instead of continuing
> development of our own?

I can think of a couple of reasons, like keeping the build system in  
sync with upstream. What happens when the debian build system is  
changed and all of a sudden debs do not build on maemo? You will have  
a lot of unplanned work on your hands because a significant amount of  
maemo packages are taken directly from debian with little change.

> Autobuilder is working for one year already without problems. Who
> prevents us to develop Web UI  for it or check for packages
> installability or whatever community wants?


Maemian is desinged to address packages and their stability problems,  
so hopefully that issue will be mitigated somewhat over time. A web  
interface to the autobuilder sounds good.

The original post to this thread was simply mentioning that debian is  
going to make some changes to their automated build system. This will  
impact debs and may therefor impact the maemo build system. It might  
save time and energy if those who maintain the automated build system  
in maemo kept abreast of the changes in debian.

Jeremiah