On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Zach Pfeffer zach.pfeffer@linaro.org wrote:
[...]
For Android we have:
https://android-build.linaro.org/builds/~linaro-android/panda-12.01-release/
we should have the same thing for Ubuntu:
ubuntu-build.linaro.org
with the similar information.
I'm not sure about that: for Debian/Ubuntu there are established methods for getting source and provenance info. It's a solved problem, so we should just use the mature solution instead of insisting on inventing our own.
A key issue is that there is a fundamental difference between the way building and versioning works between the Debian and Android worlds.
In Android, if I understand correctly, the whole build is effectively done from a single tree, so you can meaningfully tag a whole release and bungle source for it without tagging individual components. Am I correct here?
In the Debian way of doing things, builds are incremental and continuous there is no single tree containing all the source for a release. Bootstrapping a whole release from pure source is a rare event, and involves a significant manual effort. Rather, a release is a particular set of versions of particular packages, not built as part of the release process, but instead the set of newest pre-built versions of the chosen packages at the time the release was defined. Also, once you have the platform running you can upgrade it piecemeal, package by package. So establishing metadata at the release level only is hard and makes little sense: the metadata must be tracked at the package level in any case.
All this means that the way we track a source project (such as the Linux kernel) which is common between both worlds must accommodate both worlds. If it fails to accommodate either, we will encounter trouble in one world or the other.
For the kernels, we do almost get things right for Ubuntu-land, but just not right _enough_ that finding the source works reliably in the same way as for every other package.
A UI is a good thing if it is built on firm foundations, but I fear that if we don't get the fundamentals correct, no amount of UI polishing is going to hide the instability that lurks beneath.
Cheers ---Dave