[maemo-community] [GSoC 09] - Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded

[From: Carsten V. Munk]

Kees Jongenburger wrote:
> Mer is an other excellent and
> but really different project with more focus on end-user usabilty v.s
> core reusability :p
>
>   
Just to get any misconceptions out of the way - Mer actually does focus 
on core reusability, - we want Hildon and such to be portable, and 
preferably straight from upstream, so we don't have any deltas to them, 
- we have no interest in maintaining our own version of the Hildon 
platform, other than building it for the distribution.
You can see http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Documentation/Common_packages for 
our current status. Ideally we should have most packages being same 
version, or with only deltas for Mer specific functionality or 
compatibility.

We work on Mer not just to make Mer better, but to give the community a 
possibility to make valuable contributions to the Maemo platform and a 
place to experiment with new ideas, eventually easily adaptable to the 
consumer-targeted Maemo OS.

When Fremantle beta comes out we will submit patches to Hildon and Maemo 
software in order to improve portability (we have over 20+ weeks of work 
to contribute)  - such as removing Scratchbox-isms, assumptions on 
existence of packages because they're in Scratchbox devkit, and other 
things. This will improve the ability for anyone to take the Hildon 
packages straight from Maemo and use them in their build/packaging 
system, be it OE, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, whereever.

I'm personally excited about the OpenEmbedded GSoC project, as it will 
help putting the Maemo platform on more devices and platforms where Mer 
for instance doesn't fit in so easily, and I'll do my part to help 
rkirti with her project - with the knowledge gained through burying 
ourselves deep in Maemo packages for over 20 weeks.

Stskeeps/Carsten V. Munk
Mer developer.