[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Thomas Perl <th.perl at gmail.com> writes:

> 2010/3/8 Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com>:
>> ext Benoît HERVIER <khertan at khertan.net> writes:
>>> The purpose is to migrate my softwares from "extras" to my own
>>> repository as i ll not push anymore my applications to extras, but
>>> only on my own repository.
>>
>> Ahh, ok.  This is not something that is well supported (as you have
>> found out), and I believe the Maemo community discourages this.  Maybe
>> there is a possibilty for you to keep your package in Extras?
>
> I have a similar problem. If the Maemo community wants developers to
> publish their packages in Maemo Extras, please make sure that problems
> with the autobuilder are dealt with in a reasonable time frame.

Fair enough.

If this issue remains, I would recommend to set up one alternative
repository and create a new "package domain" for it.  Such a fork would
be painful, and I really hope we can solve the technical issues.

But, just to be perfectly clear: the "package domain" system was
explicitly designed to allow clean forks, and once you have set it up
for your repo, it will protect your repository against 'accidental'
uploads to maemo.org just as it protects maemo.org now.

> I haven't published a new version of MaePad in Extras for nearly a
> month now, because of autobuilder issues (with sharing-dialog-dev):
>
> https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9070

I agree that it is unreasonable to let this bug remain untouched for so
long.

> [...] and because of the "trust domain" issue, this might result in
> several people requesting to have their packages pulled from Extras in
> order to be able to distribute their packages from another repo [...]

The "domain check" is only done when updating a package; it will allow
the initial installation to come from any repository whatsoever.  It was
designed to prevent people from 'hijacking' packages by accident, by
locking updates to the repository that the initial version was installed
from.

But of course, having a old version of a package in Maemo Extras that is
no longer maintained isn't good for anything, so it is better to remove
it.  Alternatively, you could upload one last version to it that somehow
advertises your new repository (or even automatically configures your
new repository and package domain, but you didn't hear that from me, and
if you do that, please don't do it silently).