[Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Policy for activities for downstream inclusion

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 09:05:53AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 5:27 AM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> what is the current status for activity releases in order to include 
>> them in distributions like Soas*? Do you guys need tarballs or did 
>> you switch over to construct the rpms from the .xo? For example the 
>> latest Paint rpm uses the .xo AFAIK (build even the binaries from the 
>> non-python sources in the bundle).
>>
>> And is the email from ASLO enough for packagers to know about new 
>> releases? Any other notification that packagers need?
>
>In the .deb side of the universe, we prefer tarballs but we can work 
>directly from the git repository.

True, the Debian workflow generally is optimized for (gzip or bzip2 
compressed) tarballs.  It is possible to step aside from that and custom 
generate tarballs based on whatever unusual formats provided upstream, 
e.g. pulling it out of Git repositories or extracting from xo packages.  
But then we loose some of the nice infrastructure, like automatic 
tracking of new releases across all 30.000 upstreams.

I believe Debian is not alone in preferring tarballs from upstream 
authors.  I believe it is quite general in the FLOSS world.  Feel free 
to be weird and unusual also in this area, just beware that you put a 
slight higher burden on your downstreams every time you choose to stand 
out from the crowd.  So consider the benefits are worth the risk of 
loosing consumption from some downstreams.


>I have cced jonas for an official position.

Thanks for notifying me, David.


  - Jonas

-- 
  * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
  * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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