Brainstorm 2010/Garage and developer services

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This article is continued discussion from the Maemo brainstorm 2010
Please see the Brainstorm 2010 agenda for more.


[edit] Garage and developer services

Garage, subversion and git repositories, autobuilders, issue trackers, mailing lists... what can be done to improve the Maemo application developer experience by the community?


  • requests for improvements
    • do not auto-upload to public repo on succeeding build, give developer a method to check the actual result prior to "publishing" the package (gri)
    • have a purge button, so a successfully built package that doesn't look like intended, can be removed/overwritten by a modified version, without need for incrementing version number (synt: bundyo, nicolai)
  • debate about alternatives
    • qgil says there are better alternatives nowadays, so why put effort into improvements of the current service
    • Ferenc Szekely points to functions of garage that are hard to implement in any of the alternative services, like upload privileges to extras
    • Jaffa about the current setup:
      • #advantages:
      • familiarity between projects
      • cross-project collaboration
      • streamlined tools for Maemo
      • single authentication/authorisation point
      • svn
      • #disadvantages / requests for improvement:
      • poor communication in the past (move to vcs.maemo.org and drop.maemo.org)
      • concerns about qgil's suggestion to go into "maintenance mode" might cause bit rot
    • qgil calls for staying on topic, which is "what are the top priority tasks at maemo for the next 6 months". Then he claims maemo developer services has pretty much all it needs, and most of the developers will migrate to meego in a short while, so we shouldn't waste effort on improving maemo developer services
    • Jaffa (and Tekojo) disagrees on the meego part of qgil. In the scope of this brainstorm impact of meego on maemo still unclear.
    • Tekojo nicely summarizes: "What it needs to do it does it already. Here I agree. Garage has been a fairly low maintenance, reliable service for a long time. Don't poke at it without a good reason. And if such reasons come up, Ferenc knows where to poke"