Activities packaging

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

> A general note about activities packaging... It seem like some of the 
> packages submitted for review uses git snapshots. I would prefer to get 
> releases from upstream for various reasons. I wrote a script to make it 
> trivial to make a source release and I'm figuring out the best way to 
> solicit activity authors to get in the habit.

If the script is trivial, perhaps it's something we put on the shoulders 
of the packagers, rather than the maintainers?

I ran into this when I tried to package Pippy.  I think the problem is 
that Activities are perhaps a bit lighter weight than many more "formal" 
applications, and thus the notion of a "release" is a bit less... clear.

This may bite us for a number of reasons.  There's a whole art around 
release engineering, even in its most minimal form, that you sort of have 
to "buy into".

Ideally, we could just say "create release tarballs" and make it so by 
fiat... but I don't yet have a feel for how committed activity developers 
are in general.

--g