Proposal for a Debian Packaging working group

Revision as of 10:09, 7 April 2010

The role of MeeGo working groups are explained at http://meego.com/about/governance

This is a request to the Technical Steering Group to approve the creation of a Debian Packaging working group. There is no procedure defined but we can can improvise with some common sense.

The proposal was turned down by the MeeGo Technical Steering Group; "AGREED: The TSG doesn't see the need to have an official team working on Debian packaging. (qgil, 20:52:38)" IRC meeting logs

How to contribute

Since there is no "official" support from MeeGo's side, we'll have to find a way to insure that the bits we want from MeeGo get imported into Debian. We'll need to find a way to organize this work within our community so that we don't duplicate work and can keep various libraries and packages up to date.

Mission

Ensure that it's possible to build Meego systems based on DEB packages and optionally managed by APT.

Areas

Technical responsibilities

• Improve the infrastructure based on OBS wherever needed to correctly support Debian packages (both source and binary) and APT sources.
• Packaging policy for Debian packages provided by Meego (it might diverge from the official Debian policy for various reasons).
• Provide and maintain the "debian" directory in all Meego software repositories.
• Provide DEB and or APT-powered alternatives for end-user applications dealing with package management (graphical application installer for instance).

Organizational responsibilities

• Decide who will receive commit rights for the purpose of maintaining the debian directories/branches in all the Meego repositories.

Rationale

While the founders of Meego have clearly selected RPM due to availability of some testing/QA infrastructure coming from Moblin, there's no technical reason why DEB/APT could not be used to build alternate Meego system images, and some existing and potential MeeGo community participants have substantial existing expertise and investment in product lifecycle infrastructure built around Debian packaging.

The OBS build system is able to cope with Debian packages and the number of contributors with a Debian background is sufficiently high to provide the required packaging files.

Official DEB/APT support will avoid useless Meego forks and ensure that everybody is able to work as close to upstream as possible. It also makes it easier to offer an upgrade path for existing Maemo devices to Meego.

An official MeeGo debian port might simplify the path for applications going from Maemo to MeeGo, easing the job of Nokia and community developers.

Contributors

Coordinators of this working group:

• Raphael Hertzog / buxy - Debian developer, self-employed as free software consultant/developer. I'd like to use my long experience as Debian developer to ensure that we do the proper technical choices to make Debian packaging as easy as possible in the context of Meego.
• Loïc Minier / lool - Ubuntu and Debian developer. My main interest is in improving the Ubuntu and Debian armel ports, providing better tools for embedded development, and graphical user interfaces for end-user devices.
• Julian Andres Klode / jak - Debian developer, interested in packaging stuff.

Meego members interested in taking an active role in this working group. Please detail your interests and what you can contribute to the group (Please keep this list alphabetically-ordered, as it will make finding people easier):

• Adrian Yanes / ayanes - Debian maintainer & mobile developer. Interested in help providing easy integration of MeeGo and Debian packaging.
• Aloisio Almeida Jr / aloisiojr - Mobile platform developer. Long time developing embedded debian-like distributions. Also want to see a DEB repository for Meego.
• Bdale Garbee / bdale - Debian and HP
• David Greaves / lbt - OBS/build guy for Mer and on the Meego build WG. Also involved in OBS inside Nokia.
• Erle Pereira / eap - Free software development and support. Interested working on Meego + Debian packaging to make the road as easy as possible. Working as an Independent consultant, experienced in aligning free software with Business goals for organisations.
• Fathi Boudra / fabo - Debian developer, software engineer
• Jeremiah C. Foster - Current Maemo 'debmaster', interested in keeping the ecosystem thriving and open.
• Philippe Coval / rzr - Debian packager and mobile developer, interested into packaging or merging efforts done debian, ubuntu, maemo and mer sides ...
• Sivan Greenberg / sivang - Former Ubuntu developer (might apply for universe upload rights again for pushing MeeGo's SDK stuff) In for doing Debian packaging work and using CDBS for automation. Would like to foresee a common development base that would automatically produce both RPMs and DEBs from the same source pkg.

Resources

• MeeGo repository on Gitorious