[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions
Thomas Petazzoni
thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com
Mon Oct 14 07:09:04 UTC 2013
Dear Jerzy Grzegorek,
On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 23:04:47 +0200, Jerzy Grzegorek wrote:
>
>
> Hi Thomas,
>
>
> > 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!
>
> Thanks for your suggestions.
> Do you mean something like this ?
>
> Package name Current version New upstream releases Reverse
> dependencies
> =======================================================================================
>
> ...
> apr ............... 1.4.6 ........................................
> apr-util log4cxx
> apr ..................................... 1.4.8
> apr-util .......... 1.4.1
> apr-util ................................ 1.5.1
> apr-util ................................ 1.5.2
I'm not sure listing all reverse dependencies will actually be useful
and/or possible. But yet, the idea is to add a mechanism that allows to
automatically check, for a given package, if there is a new upstream
version available.
Also, I believe there is no need to list multiple "new" upstream
releases (as you did for apr-util above), listing the latest one
available is fine.
Again, for now, the core of the problem is to be able to *detect* when
an upstream version is available for a given package. Once that is
done, we will see at integrating that into the statistics page I
mentioned earlier, and do all the automated execution.
Best regards,
Thomas
--
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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