Re: [anjuta-devel] [Fwd: Packaging and deployment using GNOME tools]

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

Hi Sébastien,

On Sun, 2010-12-19 at 19:16 +0100, Sébastien Granjoux wrote:
> I'm currently too busy, working on the new project-manager to really 
> work on this. But if it needs some changes in the project-manager, I'm 
> interested to see what is needed.

I'm not really sure what this will take. Ideally, an Anjuta user would
be able to click "Build as XXX package" button or something and have
most of the packaging done for them. Would this require some assumptions
on the project type from the start? (i.e. would they have to choose an
"XXX package" project type first?)

> I have looked at one video on Quickly. It is doing almost the same thing 
> than Anjuta using the command line. The package creation is only a part 
> of its possibilities. By the way Anjuta, can already create package 
> quite easily using Build->Build tarball menu item. It doesn't make a 
> binary, but a source tarball is still the most standard way of 
> distributing something on Linux.

Yes, it's only really the packaging/publishing aspect of Quickly that
Anjuta doesn't currently do. That's the part that I'm most interested
in; we can leave it up to Anjuta as-is to do the GUI
design/debugging/etc.

Tarballs are fine for people providing software for distros who then
package it themselves, but lots of developers will want to build, for
example, their own Ubuntu packages and host them on their website. This
is currently difficult, which is the problem.

> It's possible to make an Anjuta plugin around Quickly but it doesn't 
> match the way the functions are split in Anjuta. The project wizard 
> plugin is creating a new project, the build plugin is building it, the 
> run plugin can run it, the debugger plugin is used to debug it but all 
> this is done by Quickly. As all plugins can communicate it's possible to 
> write a Quickly plugin that will manage all this but it's difficult.
>
> Else, I have looked at the OpenSuse build service web page but not long 
> enough to see how it could help here.
>
> Then, a simple solution is just to add a rpm or deb target to the 
> template makefiles and propose a menu item for this in the build menu. 
> But I'm not sure it's possible to make something working on any 
> distribution as there is no real standard here.

There's no need to fully implement the Quickly interface - only the
packaging stuff is needed really.

Can anyone outline broadly what would be needed to get something like
this working? For example, people at the hackfest mentioned a need to
convert between different package naming standards in distros (for
dependencies etc.). Then would you need some sort of parser (or settings
dialog) that handles deps? And maybe package templates, or packaging
format description files?

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm