[Mud-builder-users] MUD direction?

[Andrew Flegg]

Hi,

With the progress of the extras-devel autobuilder and extras promotion
interface, I think the auto-building aspect of MUD is less important
now. However, *more* important is the ease of people easily building
packages, maintaining them and easing the upload/sign process.

I know Graham's got a lot of experience with this already, and - over
the weekend - I'm going to be trying to use MUD to produce vala
packages for extras which will be usable by other projects (including
my own!) to have stuff built and hosted in extras.

I suspect this means an improvement, or at least a revisting of MUD's
usage. Having spoken to Niels on IRC, he thinks there's also room for
a package-building assistant, and we both think MUD could be it.

So, for an initial stab, I'd like to refocus MUD on building *source*
packages which can be uploaded to the autobuilder, whilst keeping:

  * Taking an upstream project (from somewhere) and applying zero or
more patches.
  * Proper debification and Maemo additions (like Section: user/ and the icon)
  * Test building the packages to ensure they work.

And adding in:

  * Ensuring that the Build-Depends are accurate and that the package
is likely to
    build on the autobuilder.
  * Assistance with signing and uploading packages (e.g. remembering debsign ID)
  * Some basic checks to help produce more friendly Maemo packages (i.e.
    warnings if going outside standard Sections)

Some of these might require additional MUD packages (e.g. gnupg[1])
and some integration with the "base" package list included as standard
in the SDK (either hard-coded or auto-generated somehow).

What're peoples thoughts?

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] http://wiki.maemo.org/Diablo:_Missing_Packages#Packages_missing_from_SDK

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/