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

[Simon Schampijer]

On 09/15/2010 10:41 AM, David Farning wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org>  wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 00:51, Jonas Smedegaard<dr at jones.dk>  wrote:
>>> 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,
>>
>> This time we weren't trying to outsmart everybody else ;)
>>
>> We actually do believe in tarballs and tagging, even if we don't get
>> it right always. We have these instructions for modules in glucose and
>> fructose and of course I recommend them as well to other modules:
>
> I took Simon's comment earlier in the the thread that we shouldn't use
> git repos and instead us XO bundles as the weird part:(

"We should not go from the git repository. Either use the .xo or a tarball."

To quote myself. Ideally there would be tarballs that only contain 
sources (like Peter said). Those should be used. If not I prefer the 
.xo, since this is clearly a released Version of the activity.

To help
> understand the .deb work flow:
> 1. Select activities to include -- Use the Soas activities ( no need
> to reinvent that wheel) + a few requested activities.
> 2. Research activity -- Look up activity on ASLO to find latest
> release and 'Homepage.'
> 3. Find Tarball -- Poke around on
> http://download.sugarlabs.org/sources/ for a recent tarball -- The
> external, honey, sucrose, fructose, glucose categorizes inapproachably
> named.  _Every_one_ wastes time trying to figure out what they mean
> and what goes where:(

Wow, if there is a tarball and it has not been announced as a packager I 
would not go looking through all the sources at sugarlabs.org if I may 
be lucky finding one. A release email should contain the link or a note 
to use the .xo imho.

Regards,
    Simon