pkgme-devs team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 August 2012 19:15, Michael Terry <michael.terry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello!  I've looked a bit into using pkgme as Quickly's manager for debian/
> instead of python-mkdebian.  There are a couple things missing that Quickly
> currently expects.
>

Cool! Thanks for letting us know.

> Necessary:
>
> 1) /opt support.  I know from the other thread that this is already in
> flight.  This would also seem to require being able to choose the pkgme
> backend to use, so we can opt-in to the extras backend if we are building
> for extras.
>

Choosing the backend is really not something that the command-line
tool should do.

There's already a facility in the Python API for specifying a
restricted set of backends. (We use this on
pkgme-service.canonical.com to prevent pkgme from executing arbitrary
code).

> Wishlist:
>
> 2) Changelog support.  It looks like right now pkgme just deletes the
> changelog each time.  python-mkdebian kept the history and let us specify
> the new changelog entry.  Though really we don't *need* the history.  And we
> could use dch to set the contents of the entry ourselves.  It just would
> feel more integrated if there was a way to specify changelog content.
>

+1

> 3) Be able to specify additional Depends or Build-Depends (sometimes an app
> will have a dependency not via an import but from a command it runs, which
> pkgme can't detect).  Again, we could do this ourselves by parsing
> debian/control, but it is more robust if pkgme could do it.  I recall this
> being on the pkgme roadmap, but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet.

I'm unsure about this. Basically, I have this blind faith dogma
principle thing that pkgme is best when it sticks to automatic
packaging. Thus, as far as I'm aware, there's no plan for pkgme to
accept manually specified dependencies.

On the other hand, it sounds like we could both use a good, solid
Python library for creating and manipulating Debian & Ubuntu
packaging.

Also, I should mention that pkgme doesn't discover dependencies for
Python packages based on imports, it trusts setup.py.

Thanks!
jml