Ed wrote:
> 2009/10/29 Graham Cobb <g+...@cobb.uk.net>:
> >
> > Nobody likes doing something to the package automatically but, after a long
> > discussion at the BOF, we agreed that the alternatives were even worse [1].
> >
> Then let's find the way to do it better.
> What I'm afraid of is that developers wouldn't like the approach to
> change packages implicitly.

There were some very "senior" and well respected developers in the room, who 
package some of the leading Maemo applications.

> It potentially can create repository mess
> again. And I really don't want this to happen.

No-one does, however increasing the amount of work developers have to do to get 
into Extras because of Nokia's short-sightedness is also a demotivating factor 
which could lead to multiple repositories springing up.

> > In particular, there was a strong argument that the package should not have 
> > to
> > include anything (even a control field option) to cause optification to
> > happen.  Packages which wanted to do their own optification or which had to
> > disable optification would have to include an option to stop optification.

And this is because /opt is basically a weirdness caused specific to Maemo 
packaging, and (with the move to Qt) the Maemo development community is 
increasingly realising the benefits of abstracting platform weirdness.

> Would it be better to change the common part of developer environment
> and autobuilder, for example somewhere in debian devkit? If
> dpkg-buildpackage will produce optified packages they will be at least
> the same everywhere.

Have you an estimate on the comparative costs of developing one vs. the other? 
This is an implementation detail of "make the autobuider" do it. Who owns the 
Debian devkit and do they want to do the work?

A "maemo-buildpackage" was mentioned in the BOF as a potential way of allowing 
developers to do what the auto-builder does. How hard would it be to develop 
this and get the autobuilder to call maemo- rather than dpkg-buildpackage?

However, there seem to be two arguments on your side:

  1) Don't do anything, developers should modfy
     debian/rules as they do now.
  2) Make something in the build process do it,
     rather than the autobuilder.

(2) is an internal implementation detail which isn't important externally: the 
consensus view could be tested by uploading a Diablo source package with no 
changes and having it auto-optified. Whether that's through a change to the 
devkit, autobuilder-specific code or the introduction of maemo-buildpackage is 
of little interest to the person doing the uploading :-)

> > So, the consensus decision was that the solution would be that autobuilder
> > should automatically optify by default.
>
> I didn't even think it will go this way. This why I didn't participate
> on discussions and BOF, sorry. Does it mean that I should shut up and
> do what I'm told to do?

There were a large number of stakeholders in the room, representing a variety 
of different views. It is unfortunate that you weren't there, meaning that the 
discussions have to be had again. It's disappointing that these comments 
weren't raised from the minutes of the BOF posted 3 weeks ago, but it's also 
disappointing that no-one's taken charge of driving this through and had spoken 
to you about enacting these changes.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:and...@bleb.org http://www.bleb.org/
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