Fremantle maemo-select-menu-location change

While working on the maemo.org package interface, I noticed that quite a few package's developers didn't notice the changes in Fremantle regarding maemo-select-menu-location.

Fremantle changes the way applications are visible in the menu. There are no sub menus like "Extra" or "Utility" anymore. All installed 3rd party software will be visible under "Applications" by default.

This means that maemo-select-menu-location is obsolete and has been removed from the SDK. More info about the removal can be found in this bug.

There are currently about 60 package instances in Fremantle Extras-devel that depend or pre-depend on this obsolete package. These packages can not be promoted to Extras-testing until their author updates the package.

Daniel has started working on a Porting to Fremantle QA wiki page, which should point out some changes needed when porting to Fremantle. I hope this will help developers with the problems they encounter for now.

Reducing number of external repositories #1

In my talk at the Maemo summit 2008, I talked about starting an effort to reduce the number of external repositories. Talking about this helps, but actively contacting developers and repository owners helps even more. This week I started by creating a list of all repositories we need to target. When this was done, I started to contact a lot of developers to convince them to move their packages into Extras and then close their repository.

A funny thing to mention is: Nobody had any objections to this.

Most responses were apologies for not doing it sooner. When I started this, I expected to have some resistance, but so far there was none.

This is a good thing! It seems the community wants things to change too.

How can you help?

If you know somebody developing applications in their own repository, try to convince them to move their packages into Extras(-devel). Please edit the wiki page to reflect the status of each repository.

With the help of a few people, I think we can get number of repositories in the list down quickly!

Visible results

When looking at the Gronmayer listing, you can see that more and more repositories are being removed and end up as: 'Repository is offline'.

Talk: Reducing number of external repositories

At the Maemo Summit, I had a talk about the Extras repositories and the plans for the future. The slides can be found on Slideshare: The huge number of external repositories makes it increasingly hard to have a flawless experience for the user when it comes to package selection and installation. The proplems we currently face is:

• Users are unable to easily find packages
• Users experience conflicts between repositories
• Unable to do quality testing on huge amount of repositories
• maemo.nokia.com – Is not able to hand pick packages from external repositories
  

One of the many things announced by Nokia was the creation of maemo.nokia.com, where the best community made applications will be featured. I guess there will be more posts from Nokia on that topic later.

Back to the external repositories problem:
We started to retrieve all source packages from all know repositories found on Gronmayer. These packages are fed to the autobuilder to see if they would build. The status page looks like this:

Our plan to reduce the number of external repositories:

• Build all source packages available in external repositories
• Show status of builds
  
• Try to discover missing sources (a lot of packages have no source available in the repo)
  
• Help developers to fix build problems
• Convince developers to move their packages into Extras
• Convince teams inside Nokia to do the same
  

We hope to get visible results for this effort. Help with this effort would be very appreciated. Please try to convince developers to move their packages into Extras, when they haven't done so yet.

Together with Dave Neary, I did another talk. This one was about the history of the Maemo community and the changes we went through in the last few months. The slides for this talk are also available:

Rebuild all chinook source packages on autobuilder

Currently Ed Bartosh and I are working on taking all source packages from the extras repository and try to build them on the autobuilder. The goal of this chinook rebuild effort is to get a set of packages buildable 'from scratch'.

Once we are able to build all(most?) packages on chinook, we can try to automatically build them for diablo. So we can have a lot of packages in the diablo repository at release of diablo.

There is a web page up with the first run, which was done over the weekend. All packages are listed in build order, based on dependencies, with their build results for i386 and armel. If a package build failed, a link to the build log is provided.

If you provide a source package in extras, please check if your package is building OK. If you only provide binary packages in extras, we would like to encourage you to provide source packages too! We could really use some help from the community in pushing towards 100% OK build of every package in extras.

When you have updated your package to fix the issues, please use the 'request rebuild' option on the packages list. This gives us the opportunity to track changes as a result of the list. We will rebuild packages on a regular interval and post a summary to maemo-developers. Let's see if we can get all packages to build!

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.

Autobuilder for extras repository public beta

A while ago we discussed the idea of an autobuilder for the extras repository. We have been working on creating such an autobuilder and have been testing it in private. As a result we now think it is time to do a tests with a larger group and make it publicly known. Please give it a try and tell us your results.

- What does the autobuilder do?

The autobuilder takes a source package from the incoming queue and tries to build it in a fresh environment. The builder fetches all dependencies from the extras-devel repository. If it can't find the dependency in extras-devel, it will fail and send a mail to the extras-cauldron-builds list.

If there are no problems with the package, the builder can create armel, i386 and source packages. Those will be put in the extras-devel repository after a successful build.

Instructions for the builder can be found at here.

The builder only handles building one package at a time. If you have dependencies that are not present in the extras-devel repository, please upload these first.

- web-based assistant

We have also created a web-based assistant to help you with requesting rights to upload and creating/uploading of source packages. You can upload packages to the builder with either dput or the assistant.

- How do I get my package into extras?

After a successful build a package will appear in the extras-devel repository. You can move your packages from extras-devel to extras with the promotion interface. Instructions for the promotion interface can be found here.

We would like to invite all developers to take a look at the autobuilder and try it out. Please discuss problems and feature requests on the maemo-developers list.

More information about our effort can be found at the extras-cauldron website.

[RFC] Maemo package guidelines: mandatory categories

Here is my first suggestion to clean up the complete mess we have at the moment when it comes to package categories in the maemo extras repository. There is no official list of categories, which has brought us to state we are in now.

We have these nice categories for example: 'Boingo', 'Canola'. Those should never be a category by themselves. We also have a lot of duplicates like 'cli' ,'Commandline' and 'Web','www' and 'Utilities','utils'.

This really has to stop as this is confusing for end users. We, the maemo community, need to find a solution and fix this.

If we look at Debian, we can see that they have the following list of categories:

admin, base, comm, contrib, devel, doc, editors, electronics, embedded, games, gnome, graphics, hamradio, interpreters, kde, libs, libdevel, mail, math, misc, net, news, non-free, oldlibs, otherosfs, perl, python, science, shells, sound, tex, text, utils, web, x11

My suggestion would be to base our list off the Debian list and remove the categories that are not suitable for Maemo. We might also want to add some categories if we find some missing.

admin, comm, devel, doc, editors, games, graphics, interpreters, mail, net, news, utils

and add:

desktop, database, education, internet, multimedia, office, scientific, security, system, travel

Please feel free to suggest other categories. Try to keep them as broad as possible. I would really like to get a list of categories where every application can be in at least one category. It would be nice not to need the 'misc' or 'other' category.

Perhaps it would also be a good idea to have the Application Manager display the pretty name for each category. e.g. comm -> Communication. That might be step 2 though.

I also would like your feedback on this idea:
"For diablo we only accept packages in the extras/extras-devel repositories when they have a valid category."

I'm really not sure if we can do this in time for diablo, but at least we can try to get the community to agree on this. I don't think we can do anything for existing repositories, but at least we could try for the new ones.

Please respond with your ideas in the comments section, but keep it to the category subject only.

Edit:

There seems to be a list of categories for the Application Manager. I don't think that list has enough categories, but it is a start.