[maemo-developers] Diablo, do we need a separate repository?

[From: josh.soref at nokia.com]

Graham cobb wrote:
> If there are *any* library changes (you mentioned libssl but 
> I *really* hope there will be an up to date version of glib!)

Perhaps we did a really bad job explaining what not changing the
platform means.

I'm 99.99% certain that glib2.0 will be based on 2.12.12, just as it was
in the previous release.
Assuming I'm correctly reading the changelog there was only one change
to glib2.0, and that was to fix shlibs in debian/rules.

Sadly it looks like the changes were all done in some private repository
because my snapshots from both projects show the 4 version bumps all
happening in one week even though the datestamps imply it would have
happened weeks earlier. My guess is that this was because their versions
failed integration (hopefully this is explained below).

There was one attempted change, however it was reverted because it would
have broken the ABI.

Diablo is not a new OS. Most applications haven't changed
significantly**
According to the marketing material it's "Internet Tablet OS: maemo
Linux based OS 2008 feature upgrade"

The only major changes are feature updates to the browser (not actually
a new browser, it's still based on the same old gecko as 2008), a new
mail client, and the ssl change to support WiMax.

I'll actually be working on browser release notes starting this week (it
takes a long time). I might actually try to grab the highlights for the
other apps if I manage to do the browser notes in fewer than 2 weeks.


** many applications probably haven't changed at all, I can do a diff at
some point to get more details, but in general the maemo platform people
actually provide pretty colored tables of this, so I don't need to.

> then apps built for Diablo will not work on Chinook. 
> So, you have the problem that users still running 
> chinook will find that apps in the chinook repository will 
> not install!

No. The only case where this should happen is an app that uses libssl.
And libssl 0.9.8 *should* be in the repository.

And fwiw, diablo includes the libssl 0.9.7 library (and package), so
apps built against it from chinook would still work in diablo (this
actually scares me, but I don't want to read the changelog to figure it
out).

> (presumably Nokia does not allow a chinook 
> package to upgrade libssl)

Wrong, as explained above. Both 0.9.7 and 0.9.8 are installed and owned
by their own independent packages. Note that there is no
/usr/lib/libssl.so, /usr/lib/libssl.so.0, nor /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9
only /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.7 and /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8 - so there is
no problem. An app that needs 0.9.8 simply writes:

Build-Depends: libssl-dev (>= 0.9.8)
Depends: libssl-dev

An app that doesn't care writes:
Build-Depends: libssl-dev
Depends: libssl-dev

The former will force the system to install libssl0.9.8 into chinook as
part of the install. And the latter will just work in either place (as
long as the builder doesn't start with 0.9.8).

It does mean that the autobuilders should actually use chinook with
repository access to diablo, otherwise the results will be things that
aren't the most pleasant of experiences.