[maemo-community] "Community service pack"

[From: Thomas Perl]

Hi Ville and List,

2010/12/13 Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Felipe Crochik <felipe at crochik.com> wrote:
>> "official" qt. Power users and developers will be able to move on with the
>> development and testing and have everything ready for when "the next pr
>> comes".
>
> "The next pr" is probably not something to optimize our plans around ;-).

Wasn't one of the advantages of the SSU to be able to update single
packages from official repositories if need be? Would it be possible
to provide updated (and fixed) packages of Qt 4.7 and Qt Mobility
through the official channels as a single-package SSU, as opposed to
doing a PR1.4 (which probably requires building of new images as
well)? This way, users and developers just need to update through the
application manager once they have installed PR1.3 (either
re-flashed).

It's sad that even in the Brave New Qt World, we "invent" even more
workarounds (dpkg-divert for the win?) and pseudo-meta-packages and
dependencies on them and what not. If Nokia is really not interested
in releasing any updates for Maemo 5, we should better focus on
empowering the Fremantle Community SSU and releasing fixed Qt packages
through that channel, and make sure that everyone uses the Community
SSU. This would be more sane, cleaner and less confusing than the
current "oh, we don't tell you we don't support Maemo 5 anymore, and
you don't even get any updates to the buggy Qt that shipped with PR1.3
- come on, let's create some hack-ish workarounds".

As Qt and Qt Mobility should ideally be the only developer-visible
APIs in the long term, having up-to-date Qt libraries provided by the
vendor can go a long way in preventing "fragmentation". The situation
is the same for Symbian^3 at the moment - there's only Qt 4.6, and no
official way for end users to get 4.7. There are developer packages,
but they should not be deployed on end users' devices. So no QML apps
for Symbian^3 users until Nokia cares to bring out an update. Great!
(not..)

Please, no more dirty workarounds and hacks. Just push Qt + Qt
Mobility updates through the official SSU channel (or even just the
bearer fix - which is really a bug!). If that's not an option, that's
a signal that there is no more official support from Nokia for Maemo
5, in which case the Community SSU should be pushed forward and
promoted.


Thomas