Naming issue for meego 1.0 related packages

[Chen Lei]

2010/7/10 pbrobinson at gmail.com <pbrobinson at gmail.com>:
> On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 5:28 PM, Chen Lei <supercyper1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2010/7/9 pbrobinson at gmail.com <pbrobinson at gmail.com>:
>>
>>
>> I think it's not easy to persuade upstream to do so. Look deep at
>> meego-panel-zones, the HEAD version in git repo is 0.2.0[1], however
>> upstream rpm indicates the lastest version for this package is
>> 0.2.1[2], maybe they also have a internal VCS because obviously 0.2.1
>> is newer than 0.2.0, 0.2.1 fixs some bugs in 0.2.0(e.g. rename
>> meego.org to meego.com)
>
> In most cases most of their minor releases are often a single commit.
> I'm meeting up with a lot of the NetBook UX guys for beer tonight..
> :-) I know they don't have internal VCS and I suspect either there's a
> single commit difference or someone forgot to push their local git.
> Most of the team are generally very responsive and are all active
> contributors to other upstream gnome technology.
>
This is also a reason why I think relying on git tag to get source
files is unsafe. Many packages in gitorious don't have a proper tag,
especially small packages which only have a few committers. It'll be
much better to keep close with upstream and don't create unnecessary
divergence.

>> I'm not sure if meego will provide tarballs in the future, the fact I
>> found is all memeo and qt packages in gitorious.org don't provide
>> tarballs in git repo(a few of them release tarballs in project website
>> e.g. qt4, pyside), maybe this is limited by the infrastructure.  Using
>> tarballs without valid URL is not forbidden by packaging guideline[3],
>> I think using tarballs extracted from upstream SRPM is much easier for
>> reviewers when considering md5sum checking in package review. Also,
>> the git source is premature, normally we need autoconf/automake to
>> build those packages which is not needed for tarballs from SRPM. So I
>> suggest you to use tarballs extracted from upstream SRPM, I already
>> packaged some qt-related packages for meego 1.1, I found sometimes
>> it's very hard to find the exact git SHA1 for a particular upstream
>> version.
>
> Yes, but most of the Netbook side of things are from Moblin. Also if
> you look at a lot of the clutter/mx and other stuff they now do make
> tarballs and in some cases only in the last weeks. Don't rule it out.
> After all they cut tar files for the rpms, all they have to do it
> publish them separately. In the Moblin case it was just resources that
> stopped them originally and they eventually started to do it.
>
Historically, moblin VCS have the function of making tarballs
automatically, but they don't publish them to some other places for
downloading. Meego moved all those packages to gitorious now, it seems
like gitorious don't have the same function, so I think we can hardly
assume meego will publish all tarballs soon based on the fact that a
few widely-used packages(e.g. clutter mx qt pyside) in gitorious
release tarballs publicly now. By the way, those well-known packages
don't belong to meego project now, they all have seperate website.
Except there's a change in the infrastructure of gitorious, I think
using tarballs from upstream's SRPM is a better choice than pulling
source from git repo directly.

Regards,
Chen Lei