[maemo-developers] Maemo 5 PR1.2 and Extras

[From: Tomi Ollila]

Ideally (or not ;/) IMHO what is needed

1: Separate repo for every software release; It would be even better
if this can be "variableized" in sources.list files (I don't see
such a feature in /etc/apt/sources.list; on the other hand for example
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo there is $releasever and $basearch variables
to affect the location...)

In case repositories are identical one can be symlinked to another in
linux machine...

2: MADDE autobuilder :D

For this, there is a machine with filesystem with snapshotting
capabilities. After basic, minimal system for the purpose is 
installed, MADDE with initial targets(*) is installed and then
filesystem snapshot taken. I'd guess this is like the current
autobuilder system is set up -- there is sandboxed compilation
environment without network access and reset to initial stage
before/after each compilation. When developer submits software
for building she can choose for which targets to build (or
system tries to compile on all targets and reports successess).
There might be an option to reject addition to repositories
if any of the compilation fails or not...

(*) MADDE target (as of 2010-03-22) is a combination of compiler toolchain, 
    (immutable) sysroot (and optionally qt tools) and has a name to
    be referred with. The original plan (which sticks today) is that
    sysroots are not to be modifed so compilation environment is exactly
    the same in each invocation with same target (locally as in
    (autobuilder) server). Well, as MADDE uses also standard Linux (and
    Mac!) tools this cannot be enforced fully but we trust that the effort
    is good enough and support can handle it better than trying to be more
    exact (with it's own problems).

Of course, developers using scratchbox-based system (for whatever reason :)
could have similar setup (base scratchbox targets for each software
release) 


This way users can choose not to update their system (when there is good
reason for that) and developers can think of what effort they are going
to put on supporting many software releases with their projects.


Tomi
MADDE developer