Packaging Policy change proposal

After long and heated discussions, we finally managed to finish the Better Package Categories task. When I started the discussion in April, I knew it would not be an easy task. It remained on my task lists over a lot of sprints, but now we have a result.

Ryan posted about this and proposed future in his blog.

"So, what's next?"

Now we need to get these proposed changes accepted into the Packaging Policy, so we can start to apply them. I created a wiki page for the proposed changes to the policy. Please see if you would like to see the wording changed. I will push this task for the November 2008 Sprint.

The autobuilder and Extras Assistant will soon start to give warnings when your package is not using one of the official categories. These warnings will not prevent you from uploading your package, but please try to update your package to make it comply with the policy.

As we are going to change the policy, the wiki page might also be a good place to propose other changes you would like to see in the document.

Autobuilder for maemo extras repository part 2

Some time has passed since we first announced the maemo autobuilder for the extras repositories. Some people have tested it and we got a little bit of feedback. Not as much as we hoped, but I'm sure that is going to get better shortly.

Ed has been working on making the autobuilder more user-friendly. You will now receive a status message per mail when your package has been processed. If there were any errors (md5 sum failed, files missing, wrong pgp key or package not signed), you will find that out in the email.

Some benefits of using the maemo autobuilder:

• Source packages always available in the repository
• i386 packages are automatically added to the repository, so you can use them in the SDK.
• Prevent obviously broken packages from entering the repositories.
  

I have been improving the assistant by adding more checking and fixing more bugs. It turned out that not everybody was able to request rights to upload packages to the repository. Sorry about that!

I would like to ask all developers to try out the autobuilder and assistant, so we can be in a good shape before Diablo gets released. We can only move forward if you get involved!

Feel free to contact me if you need any help or information.