Releasing a Maemo application to the Extras-devel repository is a rather simple operation, yet it can be a bit time consuming and one can always make small mistakes which, although always easily recoverable, again lead to a waste of time.
The release process typically consists of:
- cleaning the source tree from all unwanted files (built binary objects, editor backup copies, core-dumps and what not)
- building the debian package, which involves remembering the command to be used, typically something like
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sa -us -uc -i -I.git
- uploading the resulting files to the Maemo build robot, according to one of the methods described here
Although none of these steps is especially difficult, there are several things that can go wrong or that can make the process annoying:
- you can easily forget to delete core dumps and other temporary files from the source tree, which might even contain sensitive information
- remembering (or looking up in the shell history) the command for building the package
- if you use the Extras Assistant you'll be dealing with a comfortable tool, but not as fast as the command line
- if you have already made several releases and didn't delete the old files, you'll have to browse through them to find the latest version
The solution I've come up with is this simple script:
#! /bin/sh
set -e
BASEDIR="$(mktemp -d)"
cd "$BASEDIR"
git clone --depth 1 -l "$HOME/git/maemo-mapper"
cd maemo-mapper
git checkout origin/fremantle
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sa -us -uc -i -I.git
cd ..
scp *.tar.gz *.diff.gz *.changes *.dsc mardy@drop.maemo.org:/var/www/extras-devel/incoming-builder/fremantle/
It's certainly not a script that you would find in a shell programming manual, but it does its job: first, it creates a temporary directory, then it clones the local git repository (which ensures that there won't be any unwanted files in the tree), then it selects the desired branch (if it's not the master branch), builds the package and uploads it to the builder. If any of these steps fail, the script terminates. Feel free to adapt it to your needs and use for your own releasing pleasure. :-)
As a side note, I've used it just now to release maemo-mapper 3.0+beta4, which doesn't include any remarkable features but comes with a redesign of the menus which are now drawn in the maemo5 style.
In this lovely sunny Sunday I decided to pick up my bike for the first time after the winter hibernation and go for a trip around the Seurasaari bay, just next to Helsinki centre. Of course I took my N900 with Mapper with me, to make it record the GPS track into a GPX file which I will then use to geotag the photos I took with my film camera (which is a rather advanced model capable of storing the time of the pictures in its internal memory), and to visualize my track in some sports tracking website. While it will take quite some time before I'll be able to show you the pictures I took (I've just started this film roll, and I don't use this camera often), I can show you how the Mapper-generated GPX track looks like in runsaturday.com, a sports tracking website where one can upload his own GPS tracks and get them analyzed and put into different charts: