[maemo-developers] extras repository problems

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Saturday 17 January 2009 09:40:11 Till Harbaum / Lists wrote:
> a) i uploaded osm2go-0.6-9 half a day ago and the logs show
> the autobuild was successful:
>   https://garage.maemo.org/builder/diablo/osm2go_0.6-9/
> But the new version just doesn't show up in extras-devel.
> How comes?

I am sure Niels or Ed will take a look and respond soon (although it is a 
weekend so maybe not).

> b) The previous version also isn't installable anymore since
> it claims to have a mssing dependency on libgoocanvas-common
> (= 0.9-2maemo0). How do these things happen? Since this
> version also was built using the autobuilder, the build mechanism
> sure had access to all these parts. How comes they are gone
> now?

Actually, the autobuilder doesn't check installation dependencies, only build 
dependencies (this is necessary in case the dependencies are circular).  That 
is why, after building, it is important to test it can be installed.  There 
has been discussion of the promotion interface checking installation 
dependencies but, as far as I know, it doesn't do that yet.

It is a really bad idea for osm2go to have an exact version dependency 
(the "=" in the dependency) because it means it will be broken if someone 
updates a new version of libgoocanvas-common.  However, 0.9-2maemo0 seems to 
be the current version in extras-devel so the problem must either be that you 
have some other version of libgoocanvas-common installed on your tablet or it 
cannot be installed for some reason.  You will need to use apt and dpkg from 
the command line to see why:

dpkg -l libgoocanvas-common

will tell you if you have libgoocanvas-common installed, and which version

apt-get install libgoocanvas-common=0.9-2maemo0

will tell you why you can't install it.

> I really think the repositories need a maintainer. There are so
> many broken things in them ...

The whole purpose of extras-devel is to allow things like this to be found, 
before breaking extras.  That is why it contains broken things -- so they can 
be found and repaired!

Graham