Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 01:19:50PM -0400, Michael Hall wrote:

> >     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/.

Note that, independent of any packaging issues for Ubuntu, upstream best
practice would have the absolute paths in these files generated at build
time, once it's known where they will be installed.  Is there any chance
that we could help these app developers with implementing such best
practices?  Perhaps an improvement to the quickly templates?

On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 05:20:47PM -0400, Michael Hall wrote:
> > It's possible that namespacing within /usr - for instance,
> > requiring each subdirectory and binary name to be prefixed with
> > 'extras.' - would give better results with regards to the upstream
> > build systems, I'm not sure. But if we are going to try to do
> > namespacing of extras packages to avoid the need for coordination,
> > we definitely would need improved package helpers that support
> > namespacing of packages (i.e., debhelper support).

> Would it be reasonable for MyApps to add a package name prefix to the
> submitted package, rather than requiring the developer to do so?
> MyApps will already be modifying the submitted package to include the
> generator AppArmor profile.

> So, for example, if I submit quickly-gtk as a source package to
> MyApps, it would convert it to extras-quickly-gtk, add the AppArmor
> profile, and re-build the source package before submitting it to the
> PPA/buildds.

For package renaming that seems easy enough to do, but if we're worried
about file conflicts, dynamically prefixing filenames when building the
package is going to have an even worse impact on the upstream code than
changing directories does.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/attachments/20120904/f78c86b1/attachment.pgp>