[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] extras repository

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"ext Ferenc Szekely" <ferenc at maemo.org> writes:

> My proposal about the next steps:
>
> We have to setup an intelligent build environment. The rough plan for
> this is:
> -get a descent hardware
> -install Scratchbox 1.x
> -setup sbuild together with our existing queue-manager (no DAK for now)
>
> If all is done then the package_maintainers/developers don't have to
> bother with compiling their sw for the various maemo releases. They only
> need to upload the signed Debian source package(s) to the current
> "extras" queue, like some of you do it today.

Hmm, careful here.  We have to think about the relationships between
distributions as well, such as what happens when you change your
/etc/apt/sources.list and then do apt-get dist-upgrade.  Also, the
point of unstable and testing is that package migrate _as_binaries_
from one to the other based on certain criteria.  (Sardine and herring
are past that point already, I think.  Herring is actually already the
new stable and in an ideal world would be named bora.)

Thus, maemo distributions should probably not be considered as
parallel universes that never meet.  Thus, all maemo distributions
share a single package/version namespace.  If both mistral and
scirocco contain a foo_1_armel.deb file, then these two files should
be bit-identical.  On the server, there would be one maemo pool/ with
all the maemo packages, and the dists/ would pick from that single
pool/.

(Likewise, there is a "Debian" namespace, and a "Ubuntu" namespace,
and combining packages from these different namespaces is simply not
supported.)

Compiling a source package separately for each distribution will thus
be problematic since we end up with same-named packages that can
differ widely.

But since it is not easy right now for the "average user" to follow
distribution changes, and our distro landscape is a bit messed up
anyway, people will want to provide their software for many
distributions, not just for 'unstable'.

I think it would be best for package maintainers to branch explicitly
for this.  E.g., if a maintainer normally releases his/her packages
for scirocco, but wants to put a new version into mistral, he/she
should branch the last version of the package that is in mistral.  The
version number in scirocco should be higher than the one in mistral.

Maybe we should come up with a standard convention for how to do this,
and maybe we can support it semi-automatically in the queue manager.

> I think for the time being we will skip checking if the newly installed
> package have all its runtime dependencies in the same archive.

Yes, that should work just fine.