[maemo-developers] Autobuilder repository priority ?

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Nov 3, 2009, at 2:26, Attila Csipa wrote:
>
> 1) The fact that something builds in the pristine final SDK does not  
> guarantee
> that it will go through the autobuilder (as extras-devel might  
> contain non-
> backwards compatible updates to the SDK packages).

So the SDK and Extras-devel need to be in synch, they need to be  
identical. Couldn't this be solved by having the SDK team update the  
SDK repos? Instead of having a new repo?

>
> 2) We seem to have an 'interesting' possibility, where, due to  
> current repo
> layout and promotion policies, you can get into a situation in which  
> you are
> not able to promote your own application update to Extras because of  
> other
> people's development activity in Extras-devel (especially nasty if  
> you were to
> make an important security fix).

One solution to this might be to make Extras-devel more static by not  
allowing developers to ship updated libs and dependencies but instead  
forcing them to develop against existing libraries. When a library is  
outdated, the maintainer of that lib (which I suspect is often Nokia  
or Pymaemo for example) needs to upgrade that library.

Pros:	Developers know what is in Extras-devel and they can be certain  
that their software will build if they develop against it
	The repository is in a 'known state' and easier to manage for users  
and maemo.org
	Greater opportunity to create stable repositories with fewer bugs in  
libraries and few bugs in packages
	
Cons: Developers can't use the version of the libraries they want,  
with the functionality they want
	  Newer software takes longer to get to users	
    	  There may be incentive for developers to create their own repos  
for shipping software

At this point, I think the cons outweigh the pros, how do other people  
feel?

Jeremiah