[maemo-developers] Help needed: packaging/distributing very small C app

[From: Thomas Waelti]

Hell, frozen over. It took me four evenings, one hour each evening, to tinker and try and fail and try again. But now it loooks good:
http://maemo.org/packages/package_instance/view/fremantle_extras-devel_free_armel/mafw-play-list/0.1.0-5/

(To test it, you need to have one or more saved playlists on your N900. Then open X-Term and enter "mafw-play-list NameOfYourPlayList" and it should start the playback of this playlist.)

Thanks for all the help and support - it's been a positive (community) but still frustrating (technology) experience :-)
I guess once you're spoiled by something like the Compact Framework and Visual Studio, a casual hoppy developer finds the current state of Maemo development quite difficult to accept...

Mainly, there was a major pitfall that I fell into:
- In configure.ac, pkg_check_modules, I had to put mafw and mafw-shared as dependencies
- But in the Build-Depends of the control file, I had to write libmafw0-dev and libmafw-shared0-dev

In addition, once something fails, it's still a bit unclear from the current docs about where to continue/repeat which steps.


Thanks again and Happy hacking
-Tom



> On Apr 22, 2010, at 11:02 PM, Joseph Charpak wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 21:58 +0200, Thomas Waelti wrote:
>>> Thanks everybody for your extensive support in documenting this process. While I encountered a few smaller stumbling blocks, it worked quite good (especially once the docs got updated by David)
>>> I can report "halfway" success for now :-)
>>>
>>
>>> The reason is simple:
>>> - No package 'mafw' found
>>> - No package 'mafw-shared' found
>>>
>>> How to proceed? Is this indeed a problem of the autobuilder (no mawf libs) or of my source package?
>>>
>>
>> The build-depends line in the debian control file is probably missing a
>> reference to mafw and mafw-shared. You have it locally so the program
>> finds it, but the autobuilder doesn't know to include it and therefore
>> can't complete the build. Remember the autobuilder only includes the
>> bareest minimum by default, you need to explicitly include everything
>> else.
>
> I would suspect that is the problem as well. I would also look at your 'Depends:' line to make sure you have all the packages your app relies on at runtime installed with your package when it is installed on someone else's machine. Build-Depends is for buildtime dependencies, Depends is for runtime dependencies.
>
> Jeremiah