Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, September 04, 2012 01:19:50 PM Michael Hall wrote:
> On 09/04/2012 01:02 PM, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> > Michael Hall wrote:
> >> Not only would it require the we carry these patches to system tools and
> >> libraries indefinitely, it would also mean that we encourage developers
> >> to produce apps and packages that are not compatible with our Upstream
> >> (Debian) or any other distro.
> >> 
> >     We rather ought encourage developers to use build systems that allow
> > 
> > one to specify an install location: then the difference between installing
> > to /opt/ and system locations becomes entirely a matter of a preference in
> > the packaging: other format distributions will not even notice. 
> > Distributions that use Debian-format packages are likely to be downstream
> > from either Debian or Ubuntu: if we share the optional /opt/ packaging
> > preference with Debian, then it is trivial for any distribution to adopt
> > the package as either extra or part of the system with very little
> > effort.
> 
> If it can be reduced to a matter of build-time preferences, that would
> be fine.  The current /opt/ rules and support, however, require both a
> significant amount of extra work in the packaging, and usually
> additional changes to the code itself.
> 
> >     As for patches in system tools, at least for icon cache, path, and
> >     desktop
> > 
> > file discovery, this is one or two lines in a configuration file that
> > already carries Ubuntu-specific patches.  Is there a specific example of
> > a discovery mechanism that is more complicated to change?
> 
> .desktop files, .service files (for dbus), .lens and .scope files (for
> Unity) all needed to be changed to point to executables or images in
> /opt/extra.ubuntu.com/${appname}/ when being packaged for Extras.  Unity
> APIs that require a .desktop or image file name had to use absolute
> paths to the files in /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/{$appname}.  These all
> required changes to the app's source in order to support the
> installation under /opt/.

These sorts of changes should be generalizable to be supported at build time.  
It would take some work to set up the first time, but any build system I've 
worked with would be able to do this.

Scott K