[maemo-developers] policy: maemo packaging policy -draft

[From: Marius Gedminas]

Hi!

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:32:22AM +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> A draft version of the "maemo packaging policy" is available
> for commenting:
>      https://maemo.org/forrest-images/pdf/maemo-policy.pdf
> 
> If you're packaging software for maemo, please take a look at it.

* Testing on a device with no extra packages is a hard to do, unless
  you have two devices, or you're not actually using the one you have.
  I wish we had a complete hardware emulator so that you could test
  package installation on a pristine rootfs in a virtual machine.

* Interactive prompts from maintainer scripts (such as asking where
  do you want to stick this new thing in your menus) are annoying for
  the user.  I'd be inclined to add a sentence or two saying that these
  SHOULD be avoided where possible.

* Splitting translations has a question about Debian/Ubuntu.  I'm not a
  developer of either, but as far as I know Debian ships translation
  files for all languages in the same .deb that contains the software,
  while Ubuntu collects all translations from a big group of related
  packages into a language-pack-$group-$languagecode, so you end up
  with language-pack-lt, language-pack-gnome-lt, language-pack-kde-lt
  and so on.  The Ubuntu solution is only possible because they release
  the whole stack at once.

> As stated in the policy document, the comments and questions on this
> policy should be mailed to the maemo-developers mailing list with
> word "policy" in the subject.

This thread qualifies. ;-)

Marius Gedminas
-- 
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when
you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
                -- Poul Anderson
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