more debian (and other) packaging of plugins?

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
| Am Donnerstag, den 12.06.2008, 23:05 +0200 schrieb Reinhard Tartler:
|> John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> writes:
|>> Reinhard Tartler wrote:
|>> | "Martin Pool" <mbp at sourcefrog.net> writes:
|>> If they were packaged individually, with a meta-package that installed them all,
|>> would you need to upload all of them each time? It seems like the meta can just
|>> depend on either *any* version or version >= XXX, which will be satisfied with a
|>> newer version.
|> Martins intention was to get the plugins updated more quickly. Since
|> maintaining plugins in individual packages increase maintenance labor I
|> don't think your proposal would help here.
| I don't think the overhead is that big. Most plugins don't change very
| often so would only need an upload every couple of months. E.g.
| bzr-email has only been uploaded once in the last two years. Uploading
| a new version is simply a matter of changing the version in the
| changelog and building with bzr builddeb (yay builddeb :-).
|
| A big plugin package has some problems:
|
| The dependencies of plugins in a bigger package could be annoying (you'd have
to install the
| dependencies for all plugins, even if you don't use all of them).
|
| It's not possible to deinstall only one plugin if it's breaking things
| for you (e.g. bzr-dbus broke for some people recently) without deinstalling
all of the other plugins as well.
|
| The source package has to be manually crafted (no builddeb magic available).
|
|>> | How about granting more developers access to the bzr PPA? I think at
|>> | least the pkg-bazaar packaging group on alioth should have, but I don't
|>> | see any particular reason to not also allow all motus to upload there.
|>> |
|>> | Moreover I'd like to see the packaging branches for the pkg-bazaar group
|>> | packages shared with the PPA packages. They are currently hosted on
|>> | bzr.debian.org, and I could imagine that we can mirror them on launchpad.
|>> |
|>>
|>> Everyone who is on the '~bzr' team has access to the PPA, I wouldn't really want
|>> to open it up more than that (and we have certainly discussed restricting it
more).
|> Could you please elaborate on that? You obviously trust members of
|> pkg-bazaar to properly maintain bazaar related packages in debian (and
|> therefore ubuntu) but not in the PPA?
| At least for me personally, the reasons for not uploading to PPA are
| that it's a timely process (since packages have to be uploaded for 3
| different Ubuntu distributions and Debian bug 473450) and Launchpad bug
| 215661.
|
| Cheers,
|
| Jelmer
|

Bug #215661 has already been fixed, I don't know if you saw the announcement.
But if you look at the bzr ppa:
https://edge.launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive?field.name_filter=&field.status_filter=any

(Notice that there is a search box, which can show Published, Superseded or Any
Status, it has been added recently.)

I believe the official statement is that "we will support multiple versions
until the storage consumption causes hardship, but we will inform you before
that happens."


As for *my* plugins, if someone wants to package them I'll merge those changes.
But I find doing "bzr branch lp:plugin-name ~/.bazaar/plugins" a fine way to get
a plugin, and "bzr update" a great way to get the latest version of it. Not that
~ my plugins are as important as stuff like bzr-svn.

John
=:->
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