[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] RE: Nokia 770 sources...

[From: Marius Gedminas]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 04:50:47PM +0100, Hugh Warrington wrote:
> Andrew Flegg wrote:
> >On 8/29/06, Devesh Kothari <devesh.kothari at nokia.com> wrote:
> >>ext Christian Pernegger wrote:
> >>>- setting up the developent environment was a bitch
> >>
> >>Could you please send me why ?
> >>- Setting up ScratchBox ???
> >>- Downloading, extracting maemo x.x rootstrap ?
> >>- Setting up UI environment like Xnest/Xephyr?
> >>- Setting up CPU_Transparency stuff ??? (need for advanced stuff) ???
> >>
> >>I am asking you, so we improve it.
> >
> >It was just a long and labourious process. The `installer' script made
> >it trivial the second time I did it, so much so I wonder why this
> >isn't advertised more as a recommended and supported way of
> >installing?
> 
> I didn't find copy-pasting ten or twenty lines of clear instructions 
> into a terminal window very taxing. In fact, as cross-compilation goes, 
> setting up and working within the recommended maemo environment is a breeze.

People have different expectations.  I have come to expect one line of
instructions: apt-get install package-name, and that's it.

I do not like to run shell script that install software.  Package
management systems are there for a reason.

It is good that I can apt-get install scratchbox into my Ubuntu laptop.
Figuring out *which* packages to install was a bit trickier
(scratchbox-core scratchbox-devkit-debian scratchbox-libs
scratchbox-toolchain-cs2005q3.2-glibc-i386
scratchbox-toolchain-cs2005q3.2-glibc-arm).

Would it be possible to prepare a Debian package that

  * depends on all the necessary scratchbox packages
  * asks via debconf for a list of users that you want to add to the
    sbox group and create scratchbox user accounts
  * automates the scratchbox target creation and configuration
    (rootstrap, .bash_profile, etc.), maybe from the same postinst
    script, maybe from a separate shell script.
  * includes the start-maemo-xephyr shell script.
  * ships with a shell script that sets up scratchbox when you run it
    for the first time (adduser $USERNAME sbox

?  The main question seems to be: can I tell /scratchbox/login to run
some command (say, a shell script that calls the necessary sequence of
sbox-config commands)?

I think the best user experience is

  one command for installation (apt-get install maemo-scratchbox)
  one command to start Xnest (maemo-xephyr?)
  one command to start an i386 shell (maemo-386-shell)
  one command to start an armel shell (maemo-armel-shell)

No extra configuration required.

Hm... looks like a worthy project for a weekend.

A VMWare virtual appliance with scratchbox preconfigured would also be
nice, I suppose, although personally I'm not interested in it.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony #9.
        -- Erwin Dietrich
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