[maemo-developers] Reviewing beginner packaging docs

[From: Felipe Crochik]

Dave,
I won't pretend to know how to create packages and try to help you with your
(helpful) wiki but I would like to share with you the scribbled notes of my
first attempt to package a qt lib. Don't know how useful it is but could be
a starting point (at least an idea) for some needed wiki - I couldn't find
any document on the web describing how to package a qt library for maemo:

http://maemo.crochik.com/qt-development/packaging-a-lib-for-maemo

p.s. The document also includes the notes on how to package one qt
application. That is what I came up with and has worked for me so far. I
haven't tried Ville's tool but it probably could have saved me several hours
of try-and-error. If I may suggest somewhere we should have a whole chapter
devoted to how to make sure your qt project will build successfully on the
maemo autobuilder. 

Felipe


-----Original Message-----
From: maemo-developers-bounces at maemo.org
[mailto:maemo-developers-bounces at maemo.org] On Behalf Of Dave Neary
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 8:29 AM
To: Ville M. Vainio
Cc: maemo-developers at maemo.org
Subject: Re: Reviewing beginner packaging docs

Hi,

Ville M. Vainio wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:07 AM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>> Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, and you're suggesting that
>> developers should use whatever method is appropriate for the upstream
>> build tools, and then handle the packaging afterwards? (which seems like
>> sensible advice).
> 
> Actually, I wasn't even considering the option that "upstream" could
> be someone apart from the packager. That's not the beginner usecase -
> it's something for a separate porting guide (outlining what you need
> to change when porting stuff from debian/ubuntu).

Well, there's "what you use to build your software" and "what you use to
install it".

If you're building your software with autotools, you get a bunch of
helper scripts for your packaging coming along for the ride. You also
get "make install" and "make dist" for free. If you're building your
software with a Qt project, you also have a standard way of installing
software.

And usually software writers don't particularly want to install their
software on only one distribution, you'll often get .tar.gz, .rpm and
.deb versions of the same package.

Also, one of the typical beginner strategies I see is someone who takes
existing desktop software & tries to adapt it for the N900. So there's
an existing build infrastructure in place already.

> We don't really want to create the illusion that it's ok for a
> beginner to create a project using autotools/cmake and expect
> everything to work - we would be doing them a disservice. It was ok in
> the early days of maemo5, but nowadays things we push should work with
> MADDE and Nokia Qt SDK as well.

I disagree. MADDE and Nokia Qt SDK may be the future for MeeGo, but when
we're talking about Maemo 5 documentation, Hildon is still the
reccommended UI toolkit and we should ensure that people coming to
Fremantle have good docs.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org

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