[maemo-developers] Reviewing beginner packaging docs

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:28 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:

> 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.

You can get "make install" quite easily with qmake as well. It's a
basic boilerplate you attach to your project:

http://pastebin.com/QfsRYtqF

(it's not perfect, but gets the job done).

> 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.

Yeah, what you have to do with qmake is to tweak the .pro file (with
the above snippet) so that "make install" works. After that, packaging
just captures the resulting files in the usual fashion. It's not
perfect, but gets the job done. You may blame it for mindless
copy-pasting, but that irritation passes and you move on ;-).

Note that "shadow build" (build outside source tree) works just fine
with qmake.

> 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.

Right. Do you think that's the average developer though? In this case,
we would be dealing with someone that has pre-existing Linux skills,
and possibly also a larger tolerance for pain and lack of
documentation (or overabundance of misleading documentation and
folklore, as is often the case).

> 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.