ubuntu-appstore-developers team mailing list archive

[Jamie Strandboge <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/24/2013 06:42 PM, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 06:21:20PM -0300, Martin Albisetti wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Ricardo Kirkner
>> <ricardo.kirkner@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

...

> One thing I need to point out: I have not yet defined how this is going
> to work in click, and I am going to need to.  If anyone defines things
> about the click format (including non-"x-"-prefixed manifest entries) in
> other packages that really ought to be nailed down in click first, I'm
> going to be rather unimpressed.  At least send me a merge proposal if
> you do that ...
> 
> The main difficulties are:
> 
>  * somebody cowboyed an "architecture" key into lots of existing click
>    packages' manifests without making sure it was an accepted part of
>    the file-format spec first (it still isn't, largely because I'm
>    anticipating this problem), and it's probably going to have to change
>    to be at least potentially a list, or some such

Not that it really matters, but I'm not sure I would characterize what happened
as cowboying in the architecture key. I appreciate the difficulties this
produces and your point of view, but I don't think the current situation is
insurmountable-- the architecture field isn't required by anything I don't think
(Martin, please correct me) and I think only a handful of existing apps in the
appstore even have it defined. I actually asked about the architecture field
when I was writing the click review tools early on because architecture was not
in the file-format spec and I observed a few packages had it defined, and the
tools were expressing that as an error. I forget who I talked to (I believe you
were on holiday at the time), but I was told that putting armhf in the
architecture field of the click manifest was ok for now and that we would just
adjust as needed later. I knew fat packages weren't defined yet, but figured
based on this answer that, like you say later in this thread, it would probably
be 'all', 'fat' or something else. Around that time, I filed a bug[1] describing
the current situation along with the answer I received, but was clear that the
contents of architecture are still TBD.

...

> Since the "architecture" field is there already, admit it: who's parsing
> it?  It's not in the file-format spec, so technically I'm perfectly at
> liberty to break its semantics without telling anyone, but I'd kind of
> like to at least know.  Maybe it's better to have a new field name, or
> have some kind of transitional mechanism.

The click reviewers tools are looking at the architecture field if it's defined
to be something known (all and armhf for now), but with the understanding that
it would change when fat was defined. They are also looking at the architecture
portion of the click filename-- but again, just to verify observed behavior and
I fully anticipated having to change this too once fat was defined. I don't know
what is parsing it for real though-- I think the appstore is still ignoring it,
but someone else can chime in on that.

I apologize if I contributed to making this more difficult than it should have been.

[1]https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/click/+bug/1214380

-- 
Jamie Strandboge                 http://www.ubuntu.com/

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature