Bundling more plugins into bzrtools

[Toshio Kuratomi]

James Henstridge wrote:
> On 14/02/2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This piece isn't about finding new versions.  It's about packaging
>> separate upstream projects as opposed to packaging a single upstream
>> project.  There is overhead for each package created in a distribution
>> no matter how small the code is.  So from a packager's perspective,
>> twenty individual, small upstream plugins is a much larger time
>> commitment than one slightly larger package that contains all of those
>> plugins.
> 
> A lot of the plugins come with distutils setup.py scripts, so should
> be pretty much identical to install.  The setup.py event contains some
> of the metadata you'd want for the package.
> 
> Won't it be possible to cargo-cult most of this packaging effort from
> one plugin to the next?  Is there anything we could do to improve
> this?
> 
setup.py does help just as making tarballs for releases helps.  We have 
a template in Fedora for distutils/setuptools using packages so these 
things do cut down on how much time we spend reinventing the wheel but 
it is still much more effort for a packager to package twenty packages 
rather one.

There is the one-time cost of writing suitable descriptions for each of 
those packages, checking them for errors, sending them through our 
review process, doing the initial import and build.  Then there is the 
recurring cost of rebuilding them whenever a distro-wide event requires 
it.  For instance, when we switched from python-2.4 to python-2.5 we had 
to rebuild all of our packages.  The packager would have to kick off a 
rebuild for each package in this situation instead of just one.  Another 
rebuild example (worse because it required patching the package spec 
files) came when bzr started including compilable modules for speed. 
Since Fedora is a multilib distro, all the plugin packages had to be 
switched to storing their files in /usr/lib64/[...]/bzrlib on x86_64 
instead of /usr/lib/[...]/bzrlib.

-Toshio

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