Compatibility between Ubuntu and GNOME developer strategies

[James Westby]

Hi,

On Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:35:38 -0800, Rick Spencer <rick.spencer at canonical.com> wrote:
> The idea is that you can easily replace the "ubuntu-application" part
> with whatever you want. For example, you could fork the
> ubuntu-application template to make fedora-application. You could change
> the preferences to use something other than desktopcouch for
> persistence, and change the package command to create an rpm instead of
> deb.

A few others and I are working on a tool which we hope will abstract the
packaging part of this. I don't think that the package format should be
necessarily tied to the technologies that will be used to produce the
application.

  https://launchpad.net/pkgme

The tool is inspired by quickly, stdeb, python-mkdebian and debhelper,
and aims to generate the packaging by looking at the code.

Once it is up to scratch I would like to propose it to implement the
"package" command of quickly, which could then be shared across
templates.

It would be easy for someone to extend pkgme to generate an rpm spec
file, or any other packaging format.

I think this would be particularly attractive to GNOME, as it would mean
that you didn't have to favour a particular distribution for packaging
of the code.

I haven't talked much about the project yet as I am putting together
some documentation for people who want to write "backends" for it. Once
we have a few of those then we can encourage application authors to make
use of the tool.

Thanks,

James