brainstorming for UDS-N - Ubuntu the Project

Allison Randal allison at canonical.com
Thu Oct 14 01:16:51 BST 2010


In the "Ubuntu the Project" category, the App Review Board would like to 
collect input from people who can't attend a session at UDS on the 
PostReleaseApps process 
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PostReleaseApps/Process). I've summarized some 
of the discussion on the ARB mailing list from various different members.

* Should installing in /opt be a hard requirement? can we delay the 
requirement until natty?
   - The tools (CDBS, etc) don't make installing in /opt easy (and 
NewApps specifically targets newer/less-experienced developers, not 
packaging experts)
   - Insufficient developer documentation on how to change manually 
generated packages to install in /opt
   - Some parts of the wider system where PostReleaseApps should 
integrate don't look in /opt (menu doesn't look for .desktop files, 
panel doesn't look for applets)
   - An existing, successful PPA app has to reupdate/fork to comply with 
/opt requirement.

* Can or should we waive some ordinary restrictions of Debian packaging 
for PostReleaseApps? (There was some tension here between wanting to 
make the packaging easy for developers, but also wanting to respect 
community standards, and protect the overall install of Ubuntu.)
   - Should we require manpages for every binary? Are manpages likely to 
be read for lightweight apps?
   - How stringent should we be about FHS? For example, are images 
installed in /usr/lib an automatic rejection?
   - Copyright, require only PPA Terms of Use 
(https://help.launchpad.net/PPATermsofUse)? Allow more relaxed rules on 
copyright, possibly even skipping debian/copyright file?

* How complex is too complex for PostReleaseApps, and how to gauge it?
   - Is 10k lines of code too great? How about >1k? Is lines of code 
even a reasonable measure of complexity?
   - Is bundling libraries from other projects (that haven't been 
packaged on Ubuntu yet) acceptable? What happens when the library is 
packaged later?
   - Is complexity of features a reasonable consideration? (i.e. a 
simple doc viewer might be fine, but OpenOffice.org should go through 
the full REVU, etc.)

Thanks for any thoughts, comments, or suggestions,
Allison



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