[maemo-developers] New features in autobuilder and Extras Assistant

[From: Eduardo Lima (Etrunko)]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 4:26 PM, Niels Breet <niels at maemo.org> wrote:
> This week we've added some new features to the autobuilder and Extras
> Assistant. I hope developers will like these changes:
>
> Rejecting packages when the exact version is uploaded for the second time.
>
> The autobuilder has been modified to reject a package when the same
> version is already available in the extras-devel repository. This change
> will force developers to increase their package version number after each
> successful upload and build. In the past we've had problems in the
> repository where a package was uploaded twice and caused 'Size Mismatch'
> errors[1].
>

Yay! This is specially interesting for newcomers not used to debian
packaging. Making this error explicit helps both developers/packagers
(who won't be able to break the repository with this kind of mistake)
and users (who will be happy being able to install their favourite
packages).

> Package signing no longer required.
>
> The autobuilder and Extras Assistant no longer require packages to be GPG
> signed. It seemed to cause a lot of grief for developers without any real
> benefits. This change is targetted to making uploading packages easier.
> Every uploader has to be authenticated to upload a package, so we can
> already trace back the uploader. The autobuilder signs packages which are
> moved into the repository.
>

Ok, so you don't need to sign the packages anymore, but it won't hurt
if you upload a signed package, isn't it? My question here is
concerning dput uploads. Is it still possible to upload packages using
dput?? If this is the case, is GPG signing still required?

> Upload to multiple repositories at the same time.
>
> You can now use the Extras Assistant[2] to upload a source package to
> chinook and diablo at the same time. No need to do two separate uploads
> anymore. This feature has been requested for quite some time, let's hope
> it helps.
>

Another big improvement here. Thank you guys very much!

-- 
Eduardo de Barros Lima
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
eblima at gmail.com