[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: community

[From: Sebastian Spaeth]

> There is nothing stopping people from making themes, it's just quite
> hard because the theme config and the desktop are tied pretty firmly
> together, thus installing regular gtk themes is not going to work - a
> lot more needs to be defined in the gtkrc. 
> In any case, Urho has helped a lot with his Thememaker, that enables
> artists to create themes, and I tried to help him so now thememaker
> writes .deb packages that can be installed directly with the application
> installer. That's pretty darn cool imho.
That sounds cool. But there is no easy way to submit your themes and
wallpapers (a là http://art.gnome.org/ or similar kde variants).
There is also no easy way to submit the resulting debs into a repository
that the user has to install. I have to admit that I lost the overview
over the dozen or so repositories that I have installed right now, just
to get some add on functionality.

I recognize that this is not necessarily NOKIAs fault, "the community"
could provide such a service on its own if the need seems to be there.
But at least this could be facilitated and helped by Nokia to establish
a more vibrant community.

The same could be said of the third party contrib repo. The
infrastructure is there, but putting the useful contributed apps there
doesn't seem to happen at all. Again, this is not necessarily NOKIAs
fault. They might just be in a position to facilitate the consitent
usage of this infrastructure a bit better.

I would like to thank NOKIA for putting the devices and maemo out, you
seem to have done a good job, but supporting us users to tweak and
improve the thing should still be on your todo list :-).

(e.g. why the hassle of describing how to add ogg support to the 770,
without putting a ready-made .deb to the contrib repository. I would
like to add ogg support, but I am not going to set up scratchbox for
this. My pyGTK coding efforts don't need scratchbox).

Cheers,
Spaetz