[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions
Thomas Petazzoni
thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com
Sun Oct 13 09:42:46 UTC 2013
Hello Jerzy and Axel,
Recently, both of you have worked on and contributed a number of
patches bumping a significant number of Buildroot packages. This is of
course really great, and I'd like to thank you for those contributions.
That being said, I would have two suggestions:
*) It would be great if you could check that the reverse dependencies
of the package you're bumping still continue to build. For example,
Axel bumped 'ortp', but didn't realize bumping it would break
the linphone and mediastreamer. While we certainly cannot expect
contributors to test package bumps in all possible configurations
(especially for packages having a large number of
reverse dependencies), checking at least a few of them is a good
idea. Also, when bumping from one major release to another (such as
berkeleydb 5.x to berkeleydb 6.x), even more care should be taken.
*) To make this "bumping" effort a bit more systematic, I believe it
would be useful to introduce an infrastructure in Buildroot to
automatically check if upstream has a new package. In many cases,
the upstream site has a directory with all the different versions
of the tarball, so checking if there's a newer one in an automated
way would be possible. If we do this for many packages, then we can
run a script every day, and check if there are new upstream
releases available. Debian has such a mechanism with the 'watch'
mechanism (see https://wiki.debian.org/debian/watch/). Gentoo has
the euscan utility (see https://github.com/iksaif/euscan). It would
be nice having something like this, that we could integrate in the
Buildroot per-package stats at
http://autobuild.buildroot.org/stats/ to get a clear vision of
which packages need to be upgraded. If one of you is interested in
doing this, it'd be great!
Best regards,
Thomas
--
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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