Re: Some blends-dev issues
Hi Andreas,
On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 09:28:19AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 07:13:20PM -0300, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote:
> > I'm trying to migrate brdesktop-* to blends-dev structure. Before reporting
> > bugs/patches to BTS I would like to discuss some things here:
> >
> > 1) blends-dev doesn't support specifying archs for packages in
> > Depends/Recommends. I've seen that Andreas wrote "...it is included for "all
> > archs if available"" in tasks files, but this fails for our purpose. There are
> > packages available for both i386 and amd64, but some can't go to our amd64 CD
> > image due to the image size (it's bigger). Ok, I can manage it via live-helper,
> > but it's a workaround I would not be happy with. I imagine it's a simple
> > feature to implement.
>
> I have several remarks first:
>
> 1. I plan to rewrite blends-dev to create arch specific metapackages
> before the freeze in December. Currently this is one major drawback
> of blends-dev that we had to accept with the current build system because
> otherwise we would have had to recreate debian/control file in the
> build process while beeing online which is not acceptable in Debian
> policy. I hope to get this solved soon.
>
> 2. Once the rewrite is done we might consider also specifying architectures
> as you want. But you might also consider the "Avoids" field which is
> described in
>
> http://blends.alioth.debian.org/blends/ap-DevelDescription.en.html#s-blends-dev
>
> I try to keep in mind the arch specification.
Good to know!
> > 2) I think /usr/share/blends-dev/rules is repeating work which has been made in
> > CDBS. CDBS provides a debhelper rules file very similar to the one from
> > blends-dev.
>
> I learned in previous discussions that people mix up the common rules file
> for blends with CDBS. While both try to hide common stuff from the user
> by using shorter rules files this is the only similarity. CDBS is doing
> much more than blends-dev and the comparison is not really valid.
Sure CDBS does much more, but the fact is that blends rules is doing a work
that is partially made in CDBS (eg. basic debhelper stuff). I think blends
specific rules would perfectly fits as a CDBS class, so leaving the core to
CDBS. It makes things easier for you and for blends which needs more
flexibility in their rules.
> > Also, some blends (like brdesktop) may want to use specific rules
> > from CDBS (ex: makefile.mk) which seems to conflict with blends-dev rules. So,
> > please consider having a blends.mk rules file in CDBS *only* for specific
> > blends stuff rather than maintaining a full-featured rules file.
>
> What exactly do you want to use from makefile.mk? You should know that
For now I need to scan my subdirs and perform a make $target for each one I
find (makefile.mk does it for me). For the future I may want to use CDBS gnome
rules or such.
> you are perfectly free to ignore /usr/share/blends-dev/rules and rewrite
> your own rules file instead of including the blends-dev rules. It is
> just for your comfort and worked so far for all other blends. If you
> are able to specify what exactly is needed I would try to realise this
> in the common rules file for sure.
Yes, I'm free to do it, and even to look for Makefiles by myself. The thing is
the rules file from blends-dev is a nice feature which I would like to use, but
it has actually been conflicting with other nice Debian features I also would
be happy using :)
I know it works for all other blends. The thing is we know brdesktop is quite
different, but I think it's not a reason to ignore it in some blend-dev
aspects. Brdesktop is not supposed to use a lot of blends-dev features (menus,
user oriented stuff etc), so at least the core features should be available for
it.
> > 3) Please upload 0.6.4.
>
> I've got a report that cdd-dev (the compatibility package) to the old
> packages does not install on a clean chroot system. I'd like to fix
> this before I upload the next package. I hope to solve this over the
> weekend.
>
> > We can't use our autobuilder before it since we use a
> > cow chroot where we can't checkout the lastest svn revision. We need that
> > version in Debian, which fixes that old debian-* requirement for blends name.
>
> Hope to get this done soon!
>
> > Btw, thanks for fixing it :)
>
> Sure!
>
> Kind regards and thanks for considering blends-dev
Thank you!
--
Tiago Bortoletto Vaz
http://tiagovaz.org
0xA504FECA - http://pgp.mit.edu
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