[maemo-developers] extras: autobuilders

[From: Simon Pickering]

>>> - It feels reasonable to say that a project must have a garage page,
>>>   in order to use the auto-builder.
>>
>> What about the myriad libraries that will be added to build all the
>> random apps we want? Would each of these need a Garage page or could
>> they all be grouped under the same page? I imagine most of these will
>> be simple modifications (if they even need that) of existing debian
>> packages and therefore a Garage project is probably overkill, a
>> maintainer's email address ought to be enough.
>
> Usually more than one project depend on some library, so if one project
> has the "control" of that library, it might not be ideal - for example
> library removal as unnecessary.. Booom.. other projects wont compile..
>
> Separate projects for every library is too heavy. Maybe there could be a
> project for shared libraries? Or even more I would like the idea that
> the libraries would be there already waiting - the same way when I start
> to devel on top of Debian - the need to go and make your own library
> packages is quite minimal.It might be possible to autocompile most of
> the Debian archive for Maemo. Then one could apt-get dependencies for
> development or use.

I quite agree. These libraries are the main thing I want from an 
autobuilder and if they could all be done automatically then that would 
be great, though I imagine there are too many to just compile every 
library for the platform, so some form of requesting a library would be 
needed. Then we possibly come back to individuals adding some sort of 
build recipe for each library they want (even though lots of them will 
be trivial).

Although having an email address of the person who 'ported' them would 
allow error reporting, perhaps a better option here is to setup a 
centralised mailing list specifically for these autobuilt packages and 
let people submit their bug reports to that - this means that such 
reports are out in the open (as is the source and the build recipes) 
and would allow more than one person to contribute to any given package 
(e.g. if someone is on holiday, or gets bored, etc.)


Simon