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

[From: Devesh Kothari]

ext Marius Gedminas wrote:

> 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?
>
Quite a lot of the community
- does not really want to give away control to a installer script which
ask for "root" password.
- Also as pointed out, it also does not work well for software installed
outside the control of the package management system

Now my approach has been not to make installation very specific to
debian, so that people can at the most part install scratchbox on their
distribution of choice (non-debian too), and then inside SB they after
installing the debian devkit and the maemo rootstrap, get a sandboxed
debian environment.


> >
> > 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
>
I think atleast that makes a lot of sense and would greatly improve
atleast the developers on debian system installation and getting started
experience a lot better. I will put it on my to-do list to explore.

> ?  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 that sould be possible

> 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.
>
I agree

> 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.
>
What would be really interesting is to have VMWare appliance to run the
whole maemo development enviornment native and not inside yet another
sandbox (SB)
Devesh

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