[maemo-developers] Ideas for Diablo and Elephanta

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 24 September 2007 05:14, Quim Gil wrote:
> Hi, until now we have gathered some ideas about *platform* improvements,
> but nothing about the *developer platform* itself: are you totally happy
> about the SDK and the developer tools? Enhancement proposals for
> repositories, documentation, maemo.org, etc, are welcome as well.

One area I find the SDK lacking is support for packaging and releasing.

I have spent a LOT of time on working out how best to build and test packages 
for GPE.  My goal is to support all the releases people are likely to have 
installed and all the devices.  On the other hand, I am just a single 
developer so I just have one device with one version of the OS, and I use it 
day to day.

So far I try to support mistral, gregale and bora and I am slightly concerned 
that I am only building a single bora version to support all the versions 
that are out there (but it seems to be working for now, anyway).  I find 
there are three big problems:

1) One obvious problem is the lack of the latest debhelper -- this may be 
fixed already in some release, although it is not in the releases I still 
need to support.

2) The main problem with building is to have a clean build environment.  My 
ordinary scratchbox installation has all sorts of stuff installed in it and I 
can't be sure things will build cleanly.  So, I have had to create a separate 
build environment, which I actually run in a user-mode linux instance, which 
has clean installations of each SDK and which uses a read-only UML disk so 
that it remains clean!  I also have a load of scripts which handle launching 
UML, copying the latest build scripts into the environment, building, copying 
the results back out of the environment, etc.  All this runs automatically 
overnight to build the latest daily snapshots.

It would be really good if Nokia would consider working on a way to easily 
support creating clean build environments.  One option would be for you to 
create a disk image which can be used with UML (or qemu, or maybe just 
chroot) which has a "standard", clean system for building using that SDK.

3) The other problem is testing.  It would be good if Nokia would release, 
with each version, a disk image which can be copied onto a flash card and 
booted and would come up exactly like that system as it leaves the store!  Of 
course, this would require that we installed the "boot from card" code but it 
would provide a way to (temporarily) boot each release and test installation.

Even better, would be a simulator for the device itself, again running the 
out-of-the-box images.  As it stands I can't test my N800 packages at all -- 
I have to release them and ask other people to test them.

The bottom line is that if Nokia wants to see more software made available 
from the ordinary open source community it needs to provide tools to help 
that community test and release their software.

I would be happy to submit bug reports for these but it might be useful to see 
if there is any discussion first.

Graham