[maemo-developers] RFC: Proposal to solve multiple repository, poor QA situation

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Graham Cobb wrote:
> On Tuesday 15 January 2008 10:00:10 Eero Tamminen wrote:
>> There should be a draft of this, hopefully within few weeks.
>> Most likely it will miss many of the things people would
>> like to be there and has many open issues/TODOs, but at least
>> it's a starting point for discussion.
> 
> Excellent. I look forward to seeing it.
> 
>> I think it's best to model things after Debian.  
> 
> I certainly think it is useful to learn from Debian.  But this is a VERY 
> different project: Debian is massive and has a lot of highly committed 
> support.  Some DD's are even supplied by open source companies.
 >
> Maemo is a much smaller project and (judging by the projects I am involved 
> with) has people who are smart and enthusiastic but with limited time they 
> can spend on it.  We shouldn't be adopting things just because that is the 
> way Debian does things -- we need to look at pragmatic and lightweight 
> alternatives in some cases to make the best use of the limited time of people 
> we have available.  
> 
> We should certainly keep in mind the Debian models and try to make sure that 
> we can move towards them as the Maemo community grows.  So, avoid anything 
> that will stop us adopting more Debian processes later.

Sorry, I didn't mean adopting their processes, just how to
structure the documentation.  This way we don't need to write
all of it ourselves, just how we differ from Debian (which is
our main upstream distribution) and refer to Debian docs
for the rest of the details.


>> A good starting point is running Debian "lintian" tool for the package.
>> This can be done on the desktop.
> 
> I must admit I haven't tried it but I would guess it would throw up lots of 
> stuff.  As I said, this isn't debian and the same policies don't apply.

I think the complaints it throws up are valid as a rule, some may not
just be as important in the maemo context.  I think keeping the packages
Debian compatible has its own merit, then it's easier to share things
with the other Debian derived distributions.

(Main maemo difference is that we use Busybox instead of the GNU core
etc utils, but the effects of this can be minimized by modeling the
Busybox configuration and packaging according to the co. Debian
packages.)


>> "Quality Awareness" lists some things that could be tested:
>> http://maemo.org/development/documentation/how-tos/4-x/quality_awareness.ht
>> ml
> 
> This is a good list of things for the developer to test.  But I do not think 
> the gatekeepers will have the time or resources to do this.  They should be 
> looking at doing 3 or 4 things drawn from that list.

I think at least the package tests (install, remove, upgrade) should
be always done.  Maybe the gatekeeper can just mark somewhere which
groups of the tests were done?


	- Eero