ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Apr 09, 2013, at 05:11 PM, Oliver Grawert wrote:

>well, it shouldn't be to hard to have a form to present to the app dev
>that fills in the five or so files you actually *need* in the /debian
>dir which could be hidden behind a "create package" button ... after all
>i would expect the packaging for mobile apps to be very reduced ...

There are definitely several angles for attacking this problem.

I really like the work Piotr and the debian-python folks did to make Python
packaging generally pretty easy, for some subset of packages.
E.g. debian/rules can be 3 lines of almost pure boilerplate -- if the thing
you're packaging is setup.py-based *and* it's Python 2 only *and* you don't
need to do anything else crazy. ;)  This becomes simpler the more debhelpers
are improved and integrated.

For apps, there may be patterns that emerge that allow us to do similar kinds
of "hide the gore, with ways to override" that gets you 80% of the way there,
or better.

For the rest of /debian, I think we need to take a command-first approach to
convenience tools.  If you can do it from the command line, then you can build
those forms where ever it makes sense, e.g. web-based builders, standalone
desktop GUIs, integrated into everyone's favorite IDE, etc.

-Barry

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