On Fri, Jan 21, 2011, Ramana Radhakrishnan wrote:
I'm curious to hear what packaging methods would be used for things like the toolchain which have consumers beyond ubuntu. Are we saying this will only be Ubuntu packages or is there consensus around providing static tarballs ?
For outputs of WGs like gcc-linaro, gdb-linaro, qemu-linaro, linux-linaro, u-boot-linaro, ... we expect the official release to be a source tarball which can be consumed/integrated anywhere, not limited to Ubuntu. But as our primary developer platform is Ubuntu, we also package these outputs in the current Ubuntu release and we should also provide PPA versions for: * people running older / stable versions of Ubuntu * times when the Ubuntu development repo is frozen (e.g. before an Ubuntu release)
I ask this because I've seen a number of requests about getting hold of a binary Linaro toolchain release and not everyone uses Ubuntu as their host distribution.
You mean a CS-style .tar.gz with a standalone toolchain? This came up frequenly; it's a question of whether we want to spend the extra effort of supporting this output, and whether we'll be able to manage / we'll be interested in the support of the users of such a release. I'm sure Michael Hope can expand on this, but I think the main argument is that we are interested in supporting packagers integrating our toolchain in their distros, but less interested in direct support of hundreds of people consuming the toolchain directly -- we'd rather crowdsource this to distros.