GMAE release suites

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

* A GMAE release suite:

The GMAE members (people on gnome-embedded-list) would like us to have
some clearly-defined release suites for GMAE, released on the regular
GNOME schedule, for GNOME 2.20. To start with that can probably just be 

GMAE Developer Platform:
atk+
pango
glib
gtk-doc
gtk+
libxml

That will usually be exactly the same versions that ship with regular
GNOME:
http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointNineteen/Platform
But at times in future the might lag - for instance, when people
couldn't use GTK+ >2.6 before the performance problems were fixed.
It might also involve different recommended build options in future. For
instance, gtkmm has an optional reduced API, chosen during configure,
and there was talk of doing something similar for GTK+.

The main idea is just to have a clearly-defined list to avoid vagueness
when talking about GMAE software, and to present this list to people who
don't want to be overwhelmed with the complete GNOME module list. And to
show that, yes, it does build.

We'll need an equivalent list of external dependencies.


* Extra release suites:

We will want to add some other suite, with less-API-stable stuff such as
gstreamer and evolution-data-server. I can't think of a good name for
that.

We should avoid including stuff that's due for deprecation, and that
might even mean not including gnome-vfs. We have to make up our minds
about things like gconf, but I suggest we do that by starting small and
gradually adding.

I think it's too early to make a GMAE applications suite, but that
should be expected for the near future.

We might want to call these "GNOME Mobile" release suites, rather than
GMAE release suites. I'm not sure what the current branding is.


* Building (smoke-testing):

To start with, it's fine to just make sure that this builds on a regular
desktop, using the regular jhbuild moduleset idea.

We would also like to make sure that the jhbuild moduleset works inside
a scratchbox environment, though we'd have to choose an arbitrary
scratchbox rootstrap for that - probably the Maemo 3.1 SDK for now.

We'd also like to distribute OpenEmbedded or Poky packages if we can
manage that. Matthew Allum ( mallum openedhand com ) should be able to
take care of that, or find someone who can. It would be nice to have.

There's also interest from Igalia in setting up BuildBrigade stuff for
this, even intergrating with scratchbox and/or OpenEmbedded. But I don't
think it would be wise to depend on that for GNOME 2.20.


* Getting it done

So, does the release team think this is OK? Can you take over
responsibility for making sure that the releases suites are defined and
released, asking for whatever help you need from us?
 
 
-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com