[maemo-developers] extras: promotion interface

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Thursday 07 February 2008 13:24:32 Eero Tamminen wrote:
> If some specific package has issues on x86 due to its development
> happening on ARM only, I don't see that as a problem except in a sense
> that its developers not caring that much about quality in general and
> wasting their time debugging things on ARM that could be more easily
> debugged on x86 with something like Valgrind.

That would be a completely unreasonable conclusion to draw!  Please don't 
assume everyone else's projects work in the same way as the ones you work 
on!!

For example, many packages are ports of applications which are primarily 
developed on other platforms.  For example, I do not build opensync for maemo 
x86 because I do all my debugging on my desktop debian system.  I also do not 
plan to put x86 packages for GPE into extras because they would have had zero 
testing.  I might put them in extras-devel because some other GPE developers 
might find it convenient to have them available for debugging, as you 
suggest, but that doesn't mean I would necessarily want to promote them to 
extras.

Despite that, I suppose it might be worth considering that the advantage of 
consistency means that all architectures should be promoted at once.  I could 
understand that if someone else had a package which depended on a GPE library 
they might want to be able to debug a problem on x86 and might want to use 
the same version as is in extras (not a later version, say, from 
extras-devel).

Graham