On Mar 9, 2010, at 5:08 PM, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > On 3/9/2010 2:31, Jeremiah Foster wrote: >> >> On Mar 8, 2010, at 7:16 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: >> >>>> btw I would really like to have some good tooling, that would make it >>>> basically automatic to create a package for a (sane) CPAN project, >>>> in a way that it is a good, valid and clean package. We can then build a >>>> 2nd layer of tooling around that, that would scan CPAN for updates >>>> and notify the maintainer of the package for evaluation to see if the >>>> new version should be used... >> >> Hic sunt dracones. >> >> Two issues here; >> >> 1. Bots cannot create packages as well as humans > > that's.. debatable for the case of a consistently, well structured group of > upstream stuff ;) > > Humans might be able to create the perfect package... once. But they're also > very prone to making mistakes, > especially on somewhat repetitive tasks.
One thing bots don't do well is fix bugs. :-) So it is absolutely critical that an email address get added to the package. Currently the known package building robots don't do this, or they have to prompt for this. Once you prompt, you're now a bot with a human brain, now you are just merely software. In addition, debian has very high quality assurance because packaging is done by humans in teams. Tools like lintian, puiparts, and pet all do significant package introspection to determine quality. The output from these bots has to be interpreted and acted upon by a human, which is another indication that even with a regular well-formed repository of software being ported regular, well-formed packaging system there is a limitation to what software agents can do. > > making a good package is an art and if you invest time you can make a great > package. For a uniform set (and CPAN is really > nice there) I will argue that it's actually very worthwhile to invest that > same time and then some in a tool to turn that best-known-package > into a tool that generates that package from the well structured upstream, so > that it can be repeated many times over, and the goodness > spreads ;-) > >> 2. Much of this work is already done >> > > oh yeah wasn't implying it wasn't.. just need to pick the good pieces and add > the glue together. > > if we make this a nice system, where we help the packager in many ways, by > taking away the tedious parts of the work, > like polling for newer versions, updating specfiles for version numbers, heck > even helping downloading etc, > we're more likely that the package owner keeps his package up to date... > which is good. if it's a pleasure to package > a CPAN module, we're going to get many more good ones than when it's a drag > and cumbersome. +1 Jeremiah _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
