[maemo-developers] Non-user/ packages and updating

[From: Eino-Ville Talvala]

 Hi,

I have a question about how extras packages not in the user/* hierarchy interact with the application manager and updating.

As part of the FCam API, we have a package, fcam-drivers, which replaces the built-in camera driver modules with slightly modified ones.  Previously, I've been listing it under user/Multimedia, but it's been made clear that that's against packaging policies, since it's not a end-user application.

So, when we made a few minor bug fixes to it recently, I changed the section to 'utils', since there didn't seem to be any guidance on non-user/* section names, and that's what some other kernel-modifying packages use.  I uploaded fcam-drivers 1.0.7 to extras-devel a few hours ago.

However, I haven't received any notification in the N900 interface to update to the new package - I only have extras-devel enabled, and 'apt-cache pkginfo fcam-drivers' lists the new version 1.0.7.  'apt-get upgrade' does tell me it will upgrade fcam-drivers, but Application Manager doesn't know about any updates.

Is this the expected behavior, or has the section change caused a problem?  I know that non-user/* packages won't show up as installable, but if they don't appear as updateable either, how do we distribute bugfixes to fcam-drivers, for example, if the only way end users will get the update is through an apt-get upgrade?

Thanks,

Eino-Ville (Eddy) Talvala
Computer Graphics Lab
Stanford University