[maemo-developers] Repositories mess: conclusions and actions

[From: Simon Pickering]

> I think that is the main problem. The discussion is long (and 
> so are its 
> single mails), but the number of participants is rather low 
> (in relation 
> for example to the number of accounts in garage). 

Perhaps a wiki page would be the best method then. This discussion is getting
rather long and confusing.

>From my point of view (to add yet more opinion) I'm not overly interested in an
extras repo that simply contains arbitrary binaries that have been submitted by
people. What I would like to see is an auto-builder to which one can submit
build recipes. This has the advantages that if the original submitter gets bored
with updates/run over by a bus, the instructions for how to build a package are
always available so someone else can use them or update them if needs be. A
similar advantage is that if someone builds XX package and decide they want it
to use YY package but not ZZ, but I want/need it to use ZZ, I can take the
recipe and alter it slightly to do as I want. This saves duplication of effort
on my part.

The problem still remains of how to check that a package actually works, part of
the issue here is the .deb container itself. An autobuilder should be able to
check that the .deb is consistent at least as it's the thing doing the
packaging.

The way I see it, testing the contents could be handled in one of two ways:

1) Put all packages in the main repo and if any get bugs filed against them move
them to a -devel repo and inform the package owner that they should fix/address
the issue. 

2) Place all packages in a -devel repo and then allow them to be upgraded if
they don't fail. This assumes that people will rate a package if it's good. I
think the first method is more likely to work as people are more likely to
complain than to praise (and in the case of some shared libraries they may not
even know they are in use unless they fail). This may not sit happily with Nokia
though as there may be non-working packages in the extras repo for some time.

Cheers,


Simon