[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] MUD (Maemo Unofficial Debs) project

[From: Andrew Flegg]

Hi,

Following on from bradb's privoxy port[1] and the discussion of using
the garage (in particular my thoughts about a fink-like repository[2])
I'd like to solicit feedback on the following idea...

The problem with the move to armel is that there are lots of simple
programs (mostly command line) which don't work anymore. I'm imagining
a project at garage.maemo.org - the "Maemo Unofficial Debs" - MUD
(suggestions on better names also welcome ;-)) - to make available
armel recompiles of projects.

Think Fink or cygwin: relatively simple recompiles of existing source
and building of debs which work on the 770.

Ideally there'll be 770-specific patching as well (just like Fink).
This'll obviously work well with the new "contrib" repository.

This could oblivate the need for separate source trees for rsync, vim
etc. as they'll become configuration/patches for the MUD framework
which'll automatically spit out debs from the appropriate upstream (or
Debian) source.

At the moment though, I'd like some feedback on whether anyone else
thinks this is a good idea, gather some requirements etc. Another
inspriation might be something like the RISC OS Autobuilder[3].

Some specific questions to be addressed:
  * Can the automated building be done at the garage, or is it a case
of checking out, building locally and uploading the finished debs?
  * Can this process be as simple as `svn up && make update' for end-to-end?
  * Can support be present for building from both upstream Debian
packages *and* upstream source tarballs?

Any thoughts anyone has on this would be welcome. If there's some
traction, I'll hack together some initial scripts and apply for a
Garage project.

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2340
[2] http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/showpost.php?p=17392&postcount=7
[3] http://www.drobe.co.uk/features/artifact1287.html

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/