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

[From: Alistair Buxton]

On 28 September 2010 00:41, Eino-Ville Talvala <talvala at stanford.edu> wrote:
>  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?

(correcting accidental off-list reply)

H-A-M will never notify you of an update for a package that is outside
of user/* so you must upload a new version of fcam with an explicit
dependency on the latest version of fcam-drivers. The user would then
see an update for fcam, and installing that would force the updated
fcam-driver to be installed. You must do this every time you want to
update fcam-drivers, even if you didn't modify the fcam package at
all. It gets worse if you have multiple packages that depend on some
library - you would have to bump every dependent package to make sure
everyone gets the update. This is, apparently, by design.

-- 
Alistair Buxton
a.j.buxton at gmail.com