[maemo-developers] Fremantle Community SSU

[From: Lucas Maneos]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2010 at 06:05:44PM +0200, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh wrote:
> Some of you may have heard back in summer when I announced that I was
> working on an SSU, however, I decided to postpone it till PR1.3's out.
> Now that it's out, I decided to work on it again. Niels Breet (X-Fade) has
> kindly set up the repository on
> http://repository.maemo.org/community-testing/.
 
Excellent! :-)

> Me and X-Fade have come to a conclusion that instead of faking the Nokia
> meta-package, it would be better to make a new community one
> (mp-fremantle-community-pr).

Is that able to replace all mp-fremantle variants?  I ran a quick
-generic/-203 comparison a few months ago (PR1.1) and IIRC the
differences were a bit more than different repositories, even individual
package names varied and -203 had a few extra packages.

Ah, I see mp-fremantle-community-pr only depends on packages from the
community repository.  That's an interesting way to do it and allows
removal of unwanted packages.  It may make things a bit more fragile as
a result, but I think I like it.

> Unfortunately, while this might be the right way, it caused me some problems
> with the enabler package so to work around it, a terminal window is started
> from HAM (postinst) and then the postinst exits, the user then has to exit
> HAM and go back to the terminal window to continue installation.
 
Hm, if I understand correctly that's an easy way to obtain a root shell.
Granted, in a world where one can simply install rootsh from extras that
may not be such a huge concern, but it still feels wrong.

Also, this:

	cat << LICENSE > /tmp/.communityssu

is a bit dangerous, better to put it in a non-world-writable path or
at least set -C.

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 09:26:59AM +0200, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> I don't know if it actually works, but you can also put HAM into
> red-pill mode and maybe enable the apt algorithms.  Then you should be
> able to see and install mp-fremantle-community-pr right inside HAM.

It should be visible under "normal" conditions (Section: user/system).

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 09:16:02AM +0100, Niels Breet wrote:
> Problem Mohammad faced here is that HAM holds a lock, so you can't run
> apt-get in the background. This is why he needs to open the xterm and
> ask the user to close HAM.

So the goal is to install both enabler & distribution meta-package in
one step?  Not worth the trouble IMHO.

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 09:36:18AM +0100, Niels Breet wrote:
> Another issue I now see in HAM log:
> apt-worker: Ignoring version from wrong domain: modest 3.90.7-2
> 
> Any idea how to get around that issue?

Sounds like the repository domain isn't set up correctly, but I don't
see anything wrong in that respect in the enabler package and the repo
looks correctly signed.

On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 10:28:59AM +0100, tero.kojo at nokia.com wrote:
> My opinion only, but to me it sounds a bit overkill.
> 
> Why not simplify and have an enabler package that installs the repo,
> the new mp- package and makes sure the community ssu repo is at the
> proper security level.
 
Agree, that's pretty much what the Diablo version did, minus the
meta-package installation (that only gets installed at the user's
request).  The user has to update once before seeing the update, but
that's not a big deal.

L.