[maemo-developers] Autobuilder repository priority ?

[From: Attila Csipa]

A bit short on time, so could not reply to many good posts, but would not like 
to drop out of the discussion...

On Monday 02 November 2009 23:24:12 Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> > Attila  was asking us to solve problem with updates. And he proposed
> > good solution. Shell we implement it right now or you propose to wait
> > until we have Maemo distro and all this great things?
>
> No, let's try and solve his proposal now. I am open to whatever people
> think is best, I don't want to stand in the way of a new repository if
> others think it is the right path to choose.

Just to clarify things a bit - the additional repo was a suggested solution to 
deeper problem(s) of overlapping repositories and fixed devel-testing-extras 
promotion path. I'd much rather have those solved at the origin (cleanly 
separated SDK/extras and ways to update them without one polluting the other), 
but in case that is not possible (that's a LOT of policies/people/packages to 
kick around), there's the repo suggestion. I'm not emotionally tied to extra 
repos, better solutions are welcome :)

>Can you explain how this might work and it's advantages? I am not  
>against it aside from the fact that I think another repo is confusing.  
>is the proposal to create a repo called extras-updates which would  
>hold only updates to software that has already existed in the repos? I  
> don't see how that is different from just updating the existing  
> package with new software. If you want to pull in different version  
> numbers than what exists why would you need a separate repo?

The problem is that newer versions of dependencies from extras-devel can be 
incompatible with those currently in extras (or plain broken), and that leads 
to a dependency mess (you can't get it to extras as it won't build with the -
devel dependency, and if you change it to build, then you have to promote 
other peoples dependencies as well). Remember that python2.5-dbus error I was 
asking about a few days back ? Well, it's one of the packages that is able to 
cause such fallout :) In plain English it means that currently applications 
depending on python2.5-dbus in extras are cut off from being updated.

There is also the twist that we don't really have 'stable' in the Debian sense 
of the repo. Extras is much more like 'testing' and Extras-testing is 
(kindasorta) like NEW. Of course, I'm is saying we have to stick to Debian's 
approach, especially as the Maemo SW lifecycle is quite a bit different, but we 
do have to have mechanisms that can serve as a functional equivalents - for 
(security) updates, QA, staging, etc.