[maemo-developers] some thread about packaging and QA

[From: Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Dnia czwartek, 25 marca 2010 o 20:34:40 Urho Konttori napisał(a):

As Urho forgot to set topic and I do not want to dig in email for proper one I 
used what I used.

> Maemo.org is not a distribution. If it was, then developers would not have
> to even care about packaging, as the distro would take care of that, as
> well as for the QA.

Not quite - maintainers will take care of packaging but many times in Maemo 
world developers are also maintainers.
 
> Also, the current model of centralized gigantic repository does not scale
> up too well. Just look at the state of using extras-devel is on the
> current devices (hint: slow pain). 

Someone has to finally remove all versions except newest one from index of 
extras-testing/devel so it will be less work for APT/HAM.

> How I see the current status quo is that we are paranoid of ourselves. 

Agreed.

> We don't trust each other enough to say that if you are a good developer
> (like x-fade is probably in everybodys opinion), we still demand each
> release that he makes to be evaluated for entry to extras. It simply makes
> no sense to me. I would understand it for ovi store content, but even there,
> the checks are simple: there is a list of issues that must be done, then
> the package is submitted to ovi store qa, where they test the app, check
> that it's optified and run a bit of tracing of the bg activities, networks
> use and so forth and then say that, ok, go ahead or that didn't pass
> because of this.

There were plans to start using lintian from Debian for automatic checks of 
Maemo packages. So far it looks like there were plans only. Having this tool 
(extented with few Maemo rules) would make life of developers easier as 
packages can be automatically rejected/accepted into testing if they 
fail/pass. This can cover also each new rule which gets added - for example 
those 'CLI package' icons which are the main reason of why my package is not 
in extras (sorry, but I do not plan to do new package just because some rules 
were added after last version).

> I feel that currently our maemo.org testing is more paranoid, 

> with demanding bugzilla (totally unnecessary for most of the content), 

The fun is that "mailto:i-do-not-read-emails at my.spambox.example.org" is valid 
bugtracker entry.

> In my opinion as a community developer, I really don't have the time to
> even follow the testing process even once for a component that I would try
> to push to extras, let alone do it for every fix. This is just insane.

It should be more automatic. So far I added just one small CLI package to 
Extras* and I really do not get ideas. 

First package lands in autobuilder which do build (no sane access to build 
logs - you need to track ML archive) and upload to extras-devel. Then 
developer has to press 'promote' button which adds package to extras-testing. 
Then maintainer needs to find at least 10 persons which will do 'thumb up' (in 
theory: after testing does application works, do not eat battery and not send 
all your data to evil people (exception: syncing software)).

And if any new QA rules will be done in meantime (testing->extras takes lot of 
time for not popular stuff) then maintainer needs to do all of that again. So 
far I decided that with any new app I will wait for at least lintian.
 

Regards, 
-- 
JID:      hrw at jabber.org
Website:  http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz