[maemo-developers] Autobuilder repository priority ?

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Saturday 31 October 2009 11:45:54 Attila Csipa wrote:
>The problem is IMHO
> that the repository priorities seem to be wrong. The autobuilder should be
> using the highest version in the TOP PRIORITY repository that satisfies a
> dependency to avoid breakage because of unstable stuff in -devel and
> because otherwise a package can't be promoted without dragging other folks'
> packages with them. Thoughts ?

The current behaviour is by design, but that doesn't stop us reconsidering 
whether it is still the best approach!

Part of the original intent of the current behaviour was to allow the 
community to upgrade packages which are present in the SDK.  Of course, since 
Diablo (I think) Nokia has taken steps to prevent the community from 
upgrading packages which are installed on the device but it still works for 
things which are in the SDK but not on the device.  However, I'm not sure if 
that is still useful.

It is useful behaviour for things which are not in the SDK at all.  When we 
first created extras-devel one of the problems it was created to solve was 
that a library maintainer would introduce a new version of a library without 
applications being tested to make sure they still work with the new library 
(and I think, back in the Maemo 1/2 days, that there were some actual problem 
cases).  So part of the point of extras-devel was to allow application 
developers to pick up the latest libraries -- and all developers were 
expected to use extras-devel in their ordinary scratchbox builds so they were 
always building and testing against the latest libraries.  At that time, 
extras-devel was not intended to be a "just see if it compiles and the 
package builds" type of repository -- it was expected that developers had 
done some testing and thought that applications and, particularly, libraries 
were ready for wider use, at least among the developer community.  By the 
way, at that time, most developers had a test repository to allow them to do 
things like test installation before putting it in extras-devel.

When the autobuilder and, later, promotion were created it was deliberate that 
dependencies would be promoted so that the latest version (the one the 
application developer had tested with) would be promoted.  The downside, of 
course, is that the library developer may have found a bug in their new 
library and not want it promoted!

It may be that, with a larger community, this needs to be re-thought.  Let's 
reconsider how we want the repositories (and related issues like promotions) 
to work.

Graham