[maemo-developers] Maintenance of ported apps

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 11:35 PM,  <maemo at bitblit.net> wrote:

>> If you only special case --with-platform=maemo, you can safely send
>> your changes upstream - and just maintain maemo packaging separately.
>
> Is --with-platform=maemo something you're using just for your packages or
> is it something that has been arrived at through consensus with other
> Maemo developers?

I'm not using it for my packages, modest is. Just used it as an
example since that's a multi-platform, freely apt-gettable program I
recalled from the top of my head. I don't think there is a consensus
about how this should be done.

To bring up the example of modest back again, you can do
--with-platform=detect, where it checks for libconic and makes a maemo
build if it's available:

dnl dnl now, determine what to build
dnl AC_MSG_NOTICE([Determining what platform to build])
PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MODEST_MAEMO_LIBS,conic,[detected_platform=maemo],[detected_platform=gnome])

Nothing prevents you from adding a hack like that, but basically you
would still be bundling a way to specify the target platform on build
command line, and probably invoke that in your platform specific
debian/rules. In the end, what it comes down to, is that youl'll have
#ifdefs in the code anyway - no need to fret too much about how those
DEFINEs come about. Upstream probably won't care too much.

-- 
Ville M. Vainio
http://tinyurl.com/vainio