Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi!

On 04/09/2012 10:21, Michael Hall wrote:
> On 09/04/2012 09:39 AM, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> The problem isn't just with file conflicts with current packages, it's that 
>> these packages will now start using up distro namespace.  If some app 
>> developer package ships the file /usr/games/bird-game, even though there's no 
>> current conflict, there is a package sync'ed from Debian that also ships 
>> /usr/games/bird-game then there's a conflict we have to resolve.  In /opt in a 
>> proper vendor namespace this can never happen.
> 
> If bird-game already exists in Extras, and then a different package is
> allowed into backports that will install files into the same location,
> then yes there is a possibility for a conflict.  But I assume part of
> the backports approval process already checks for conflicts, as they may
> exist with another package in the stable release already, so that
> process could easily be extended to include Extras packages as well.

In extras, all the package files (with a few exceptions like the debian
changelog, copyright files, etc) gets installed under /opt. There are
some exceptions for things like unity lenses and .desktop entries, but
those are prefixed with "extras-" so that they are somewhat namespaced.

Packages in backports aren't allowed to install under /opt, so the
chance of a collision is very rare. It's possible for someone to have
collision if they happen to have the same unity lens or desktop entry
that happens to start with "extras-", but at least that's something
fairly unlikely and easy to check, maybe something that should be
considered suggesting to Debian policy and added to lintian.

Having two packages with colliding file names doesn't seem like it will
be a big problem. From what I can tell it seems like it's more likely
that a package would be introduced in Debian or Ubuntu at some point
that is also in extras. So far, many of the apps in extras have
*extremely* generic names. While reviewing apps for the app showdown
competition, I checked whether these packages existed in Debian/Ubuntu
first before +1'ing them and was surprised to see that none of these
names have been used before. IMHO it would be reasonable to prefix
something to extras packages to avoid a conflict, perhaps also have some
policy updates that prohibits a package name starting with "extras-" (or
whatever the prefix would be) in the archives.

-Jonathan