Packaging and deployment using GNOME tools

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

Hi guys,

At the Developer Documentation/Tools hackfest in Berlin earlier this
month, we discussed some issues surrounding the adoption of GNOME as a
development platform. One of the issues that came up was deployment -
people can use Anjuta and other GNOME developer tools to write and
maintain an application, but the packaging and delivery is left
completely up to them. This is far from ideal - packaging can be
difficult, choosing which distributions to target is confusing for new
developers, and other platforms do a much better job at it than we do
(think Android, iOS).

A couple of ideas that were discussed were integrating the OpenSuSE
build service into Anjuta somehow, or using Ubuntu's Quickly templates
as an Anjuta project type. Well, I asked about this on the ubuntu-devel
list [1] and people seemed broadly supportive of integrating a packaging
workflow into GNOME tools. Quickly looks like it could be adapted for
use in other programming languages (it's all Python at the moment) and
other distros without too much hassle, for example [2], and another
project (pkgme) [3] came to light which might be able to do the same
thing in a more general way.

Is anyone interested in working on this? It could make GNOME development
*much* easier for newcomers.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] -
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-December/032250.html
[2] -
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-December/032274.html
[3] -
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-December/032275.html

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