ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Zoltán Balogh <zoltan.balogh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

here is the detailed feature description of the fat packages support in 
the SDK Tools

User story:
As an application developer I want to create .click package what can be 
installed on armhf phone, amd64 desktop or  i386 emulator and the same 
application will just work the same way on all platforms.


Technical  requirement:
 - Developer environment has all (amd64, i386 and armhf) click chroots 
[1] available.
 - Build process is initiated for each target architecture one by one
 - Build artefacts are collected to a single location
 - Combined build directory is packaged up to .click with a single command


Developer experience:
The developer opens the application project and does the magic. The 
application can be tested the known way: a target Kit is selected and 
clicking the Run button deploys the application either on the desktop, 
emulator or phone. On this path an arch specific .click package is 
created and deployed on the target what is assigned to the Kit.
When the application is ready to be published the developer should go to 
the Publish page and hit the "Create multiarch package" [3]. This will 
open a dialogue with a multi-selection list of the available Kits. The 
developer selects the targets and hits the "Create" button. This will 
trigger the build and packaging chain. The click build will be fired up 
for each target one by one with a common installation path.
The non compiled build artifacts (qlm files, media content, etc) are 
expected to be identical for each architecture and the compiled binaries 
are installed to an arch specific path. So the merge is expected to be 
trivial [4]
The click packaging of the merged build/install directory is identical 
to the arch specific builds.

Schedule:
To implement this feature we will need 2-3 weeks with testing and 
whatsoever. Our plate is far from empty but I expect this feature to 
land before 15.04 is released.

Questions, ideas?

cheers,

Zoltan


[1] Right now there is no way to guarantee that the chroots are in sync. 
The chroots made for stable frameworks like 14.04 and 14.10 are expected 
to be on the same page, but chroots made for the development release can 
diverge as it is up to the developer to keep the chroots up to date.
[2] The QtCreator's internal Build/Run frontend can not be used for 
doing multiarch builds. The reason is simple that QtCreator can build 
against single Kits and Kits have only one sysroot.
[3] The text is for sure subject of change. That button might be the 
actuall "Create package" button.
[4] We can not stop the developers to break this trivial merge. It is 
technically possible to mess around with the qmake/cmake project files 
in a way that the merge might not be trivial. But from developers who 
are smart enough to mess around with the cmake/qmake files we can expect 
to fix the problems they cause to themselves.