Bundling more plugins into bzrtools

[James Henstridge]

On 14/02/2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> James Henstridge wrote:
>  > 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.

Does the description from the setup.py file help in filling in the
blanks for a new package?

>  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.

You don't have a way to automate those sort of rebuilds?

>  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.

That does sound like a problem with the way plugins are stored on the
file system.  I suppose it means you can't share the plugin package
between x86 and amd64 even though they may be architecture independent
themselves.

Perhaps it'd be worth configuring bzr to look in
/usr/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/bzrlib/plugins too for your amd64
builds?

James.