[Sugar-devel] Tracking upstream versions with sugar-jhbuild (was: Re: Simplifying sugar-jhbuild)

[Sascha Silbe]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:03:09AM +0200, Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

>> 1) Stop checking out random unstable versions of external projects.
>> They break very often, and we cannot fix them.  Let's instead 
>> upgrade
>> manually every once in a while after some testing.
> We are supposed to be doing this already, [...]
Are we? The first line of the Jhbuild wiki page still reads:

> Sugar-jhbuild will automatically download the latest of Sugar's 
> dependencies as well as Sugar itself directly from their source 
> repositories, rather than relying on source packages that may have 
> become stale.

To me, changing this is a policy decision, so I'd like to have a broader 
discussion about it.

Advantages:
+ less frequent breakages (only on manual updates)
+ maybe less total number of breakages (because some of them might be 
already fixed in the meantime)

Disadvantages:
- we discover incompatible upstream changes only after a while when 
upstream is less likely to change it
- regular manual updates needed
- need to track security updates and apply them ASAP (already a 
nightmare for xulrunner)


An option might be to use different modulesets in parallel (latest deps 
+ latest Sugar, stable deps + latest Sugar, stable deps + stable Sugar) 
and have BuildBot instances for all of them. That way developers can use 
a reliable system, but we still get notified of upstream breakages 
early.

We already use distro packages wherever possible, BTW (*). So this is 
just about packages where the distro version (if any) is unsuitable to 
Sugar, usually either because it's an "old" distro version or we're 
relying on very recent features.


(*) If you find out that for any package we currently build on our own 
the distro version in fact suffices, please file a bug against 
sugar-jhbuild. I have little to no information about which versions or 
features we actually need.

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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