[maemo-community] "Community service pack"

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Thomas Perl <th.perl at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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

QtM yes, Qt no (because Qt is part of the core set of applications).

The only way to update Qt currently would be to make yet another
"hotfix" hack that does dpkg-divert for all the libs. Or, install a
new Qt alongside the system Qt (as done by various -experimental
packages).

> 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

Problem with community SSU is, does it have enough resources for
testing and development? We still got tons of "normal" N900 users
(those probably are not reading maemo-community) that are not
interested in switching to a community ssu - and risk breaking
elementary stuff.  IIUC it's still a pretty small effort, without so
much as a mailing list.

A "service pack" would be a safe thing for developers to depend on, as
it would keep the device mostly on the beaten path. Not much
development work would go into it, just bare essentials needed for
tolerable operation.

Such a service pack can only get us so far, so a full blown community
SSU is needed eventually - going forward, I would be surprised if we
didn't have most of the meego stack & applications working on maemo5
(but still have hildon-home etc).

> Please, no more dirty workarounds and hacks. Just push Qt + Qt

Dirty workarounds and hacks are what can be done right now.

> 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.

Community SSU should be pushed forward and promoted in any case,
regardless of any interpretation of hypothetical signals Nokia may be
giving out some day or not. Waiting for Nokia to communicate something
about PR1.4 officially won't help get anything done.

-- 
Ville M. Vainio @@ Forum Nokia