Proposal for a Debian Packaging working group

Revision as of 17:07, 3 March 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 Community working group.

Mission

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

Areas

• Improve the infrastructure based on OBS wherever needed to correctly support Debian packages (both source and binary) and APT sources.
• Decide of the 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).

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.

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.

Contributors

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.
• 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 - Core Integration Team Lead for GENIVI, interested in keeping the ecosystem thriving and open.
• Julian Andres Klode / jak - Debian developer, interested in packaging stuff.
• 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.
• Philippe Coval / rzr - Debian packager and mobile developer, interested into packaging or merging efforts done debian, ubuntu, maemo and mer sides ...
• 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.
• 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.