[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Taste the Herring!

[From: Carlos Guerreiro]

Hi,

A bit over 4 months ago the Maemo project released Sardine, a fresh and 
tasty bleeding edge distribution of the Hildon Application Framework for 
the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.
Sardine contains the latest versions of HAF components and some key 
dependencies.

Have you wanted to get a taste of the new features and APIs but had no 
appetite for the bleeding edge?
Herring, the stabilization distro for Sardine is just what you need and 
it's out.

Like Sardine, Herring is meant for application developers, hackers and 
tinkerers, not for end-users.

To taste it, follow the step by step instructions in 
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/SardineGettingStarted replacing 'sardine' 
with 'herring' in the 'sources.list' file.

So what about it?

Sardine will always contain the latest component versions.
However, in order to make releases it is necessary to feature freeze the 
software and concentrate on polishing, bug-fixing and otherwise 
stabilizing the code.
Doing this without stopping forward development requires branching off 
the code.
This is done in the revision control system, component by component as 
it becomes necessary.
When components start branching in the revision control system the 
Sardine branches as well: a separate stabilization distro is created.

The current Hildon Application Framework stabilization distro is Herring.

How stable is Herring ?

Herring is not finished in the sense of being production ready but it 
has been feature frozen.
It is being polished and bug-fixed and is already quite stable. Further 
updates will continue to come to the repository.
Maintenance will also happen there.

Start making your application ready for the next Maemo.

The Hildon Application Framework that is being polished in Herring will 
be used in the next major 3.0 release of Maemo which will be called Bora.
By porting your application to Herring and testing it in the Herring 
environment you can cover a lot the ground to port it to Bora.
The updates in Sardine and Herring do not cover the complete Maemo scope 
but they do cover a lot of the API surface:
the Hildon Application Framework, the Bluetooth stack and Python as well 
as X Window.
So most applications can get quite close to being ready for Bora.

Best regards,
Carlos