Planet maemo: category "feed:6aba26bef1bda85561351a8d3eb1097e"

Currently Ed Bartosh and I are working on taking all source packages from the extras repository and try to build them on the autobuilder. The goal of this chinook rebuild effort is to get a set of packages buildable 'from scratch'.

Once we are able to build all(most?) packages on chinook, we can try to automatically build them for diablo. So we can have a lot of packages in the diablo repository at release of diablo.

There is a web page up with the first run, which was done over the weekend. All packages are listed in build order, based on dependencies, with their build results for i386 and armel. If a package build failed, a link to the build log is provided.

If you provide a source package in extras, please check if your package is building OK. If you only provide binary packages in extras, we would like to encourage you to provide source packages too! We could really use some help from the community in pushing towards 100% OK build of every package in extras.

When you have updated your package to fix the issues, please use the 'request rebuild' option on the packages list. This gives us the opportunity to track changes as a result of the list. We will rebuild packages on a regular interval and post a summary to maemo-developers. Let's see if we can get all packages to build!

Some time has passed since we first announced the maemo autobuilder for the extras repositories. Some people have tested it and we got a little bit of feedback. Not as much as we hoped, but I'm sure that is going to get better shortly.

Ed has been working on making the autobuilder more user-friendly. You will now receive a status message per mail when your package has been processed. If there were any errors (md5 sum failed, files missing, wrong pgp key or package not signed), you will find that out in the email.

Some benefits of using the maemo autobuilder:

• Source packages always available in the repository
• i386 packages are automatically added to the repository, so you can use them in the SDK.
• Prevent obviously broken packages from entering the repositories.
  

I have been improving the assistant by adding more checking and fixing more bugs. It turned out that not everybody was able to request rights to upload packages to the repository. Sorry about that!

I would like to ask all developers to try out the autobuilder and assistant, so we can be in a good shape before Diablo gets released. We can only move forward if you get involved!

Feel free to contact me if you need any help or information.

A draft for the maemo packaging policy has been released for comments by the community.

What is the maemo packaging policy good for?

Like it's Debian counter part, the maemo policy specifies how packages should be built. It will exactly tell you what your package should implement to be a proper maemo package.

The maemo packaging policy is essentially the same as the Debian policy, but there are some changes especially for the tablets as opposed to desktops.

What good does it do me?

Well, not a lot at the moment. But it can soon! We (the maemo community) need to agree on this policy and see how we can implement it.

We want to setup a wiki page where you can annotate the policy draft and talk about things you think should change. This will be done soon, I hope.

Until then, please discuss the topic on the maemo-developers list.

Your input is welcomed.

A while ago we discussed the idea of an autobuilder for the extras repository. We have been working on creating such an autobuilder and have been testing it in private. As a result we now think it is time to do a tests with a larger group and make it publicly known. Please give it a try and tell us your results.

Here is my first suggestion to clean up the complete mess we have at the moment when it comes to package categories in the maemo extras repository. There is no official list of categories, which has brought us to state we are in now.