On Sun, 05 Apr 2009 22:28:11 -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote:
> I've posted the draft proposal to this page on the
> Wiki:http://wiki.debian.org/jawnsy/CPAN_Smoker-like_system_for_Debian_Perl_package_Auto-Building_and_Testing
>
> Main ideas right now are:
> o Some way of automatically testing policy compliance of control files
> (though I guess lintian serves this purpose)
> o Some sort of way to graphically model Debian control files
Some random thoughts:
* In general I think this page contains a whole lot of different
ideas, issues, problems and solutions, and I'm not sure I really
understand what's the concrete objective for a project.
* Another general thought: please (1) improve existing tools and (2)
works towards integration of available stuff before creating
something new. We already have so many scattered little projects in
Debian, and IMO more integration/cooperation would be helpful.
* New packages from CPAN that are not yet in Debian: IMO dh-make-perl
does a pretty good job here, but there's always room for
improvements. There are some wishlist bugs in the BTS and also the
general idea of modularizing the code, and there are of course
enough rough edges to be smoothed :)
With a bit of practice creating a Debian package from a CPAN tarball
is not really a "menial task", but I agree we could maybe save some
more minutes by improving dh-make-perl. And verifying/uploading
will always be a task done be a humanoid life form.
So in this area I see no need for a new tool (but room for
improvement of dh-make-perl).
* Upgrading existing packages: As Jeremiah already noted, with
uscan+svn-upgrade that's in general very easy and very quick for
many modules. If every member of the Debian Perl Group listed at
[0] spent 15 minutes per week on this task we'd run out of work
rather soon :)
What does take time is checking if bugs still apply, if patches are
still needed, etc. but I don't see much room for automated tools
here.
What also takes time is upgrading debian/* (new Standards-Version,
new debhelper), but part of this work is already done by
dh-make-perl's --refresh option and by the packagecheck script.
Again: I don't see the need for a new tool here but room for
improvement in dh-make-perl and especially in packagecheck which is
still an ugly shell script ...
* Checking for policy compliance etc.: yes, that's what lintian is
for :) (lintian is written in perl and has nice and responsive
maintainers, so again: a possibility to improve existing tools).
* Build tests: this is an area where I'd love to see improvements. At
the moments some people run tests to rebuild packages but (1) only
sporadicly, (2) not on all architectures, (3) against already
uploaded packages and not against the versions in svn.
There have been some attempts (both dam and me have used small
shell script wrappers around cowbuilder) to mass-build our packages,
but not in the last time.
What I'd like to see are rebuilds of our packages from SVN on a
regular base (on different archictures would be nice of course);
and again we have a project in Debian that targets that aim:
BuildStat [1]; and again I think helping to improve BuildStat would
be great (and integrating with PET and UDD and DDE and whatnot ...)
* Config::Model for debian/control: I admit that I have no
idea/opinion about that topic :)
* Some other ideas for the pkg-perl group are on the group's
OpenTasks page in the wiki [2]; e.g. that question of patches with
respect to sending them upstream, tracking them [3] etc. might be
interesting. And (not on the page but also CPAN related and
mentioned by Jeremiah) helping the CPANTS guys with getting
informations about perl modules in Debian in general.
* Everything that improves Debian's quality and supports our laziness
is good :)
I apologize if I have misunderstood some of your thoughts or plans;
and I hope my comments are at least a bit useful :)
Cheers,
gregor
[0]
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-perl/
[1]
http://wiki.debian.org/BuildStat
http://buildstat.debian.net/packages/list/pkg-perl-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org
[2]
http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPerlGroup/OpenTasks
[3]
besides http://patch-tracking.debian.net and
http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/
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