[maemo-community] Periodic cleanup of Extras-Devel?

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Jan 15, 2010, at 4:14 AM, Attila Csipa wrote:

> On Thursday 14 January 2010 20:30:18 Anderson Lizardo wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> So any periodic purge of extras-devel would destroy such packages.
>> 
>> Any ideas?
> 
> Am I the only one who sees potential problem swith this ?

No - there are definitely problems, but they may be both solvable and good. I mean if we have problems due to dependency removal in extras-testing or extras-devel, we'll want to know that before we reach extras.

> How is a developer 
> to know whether a library he's using in extras-devel is just waiting for 
> something to pull it into testing or if it's in an unstable phase ?

It is an unstable phase - that is the purpose of extras-devel.

> Another 
> problem is that all the apps promoted would pull in their respective versions 
> of the lib into -testing, which might cause an even bigger mayhem - an app 
> gets tested with foolib 1.0, but before the 10 days are up, foolib 1.1 lands 
> in testing (pulled in from by another app). Unless the original app had a '=' 
> dependency (BAD BAD BAD !) this will mean testers will test the app with 
> separate versions of foolib, or, worse yet, if it lands after 10 thumbs ups, 
> promotion could pull in foolib 1.1 in Extras even though it might be totally 
> broken.

If we can identify common problems, we can write checks and other conditions to prevent things like this from happening. That way avoiding problems in the extras repo.

> I would still think that it's the lib maintainer's choice when to 
> promote a certain lib to testing (promoting to Extras proper is a different 
> issue).

I think the interface Niels writes will give the developers more control so some of the control issues will be mitigated. 

Jeremiah