[Buildroot] Bumping packages: some comments/suggestions

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Axel Lin,

On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 18:44:31 +0800, Axel Lin wrote:

> > 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
> This is my bad.
> I did try to compile ortp with various combination of build config.
> I didn't realize the reverse dependencies issue when
> I sent the patch bumping ortp version.
> A lesson learnt. I'll be more careful when bump version.
> 
> >     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.
> Also my bad. Will be checking licenses as well when bump versions.

Thanks. Note that my comments were really meant as suggestions to
improve your contributions: these will continue to be very welcome.

> >  *) 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!

Any opinion about this? I believe it would make more sense to invest
time doing this than doing many many bumps on all packages.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com