[maemo-developers] No more 770 bug activity?

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

quim.gil at nokia.com wrote:
> Or in other words: what 770
> users are *really* missing today and how this could be brought to the
> device.

I'm really missing *stable* device. I know this is hard to achieve but 
the OS2007 hacker edition seems to fix at least one [1] annoying bug for 
me and feels more stable as a whole.

It would be really nice if we could at least backport bugfixes in newer 
N800 firmwares to os2007 hacker edition and keep it living as long as 
possible.

For this it would help if we had more detailed changelog for each 
release with the bugfix references. True that we could still examine 
listing [2], extract each source and see debian changelog and search for 
fixed bugs. This is what I tried when looking for fix for [3]. I blindly 
upgraded libSDL and osso-dsp-plugin-alsa from 3.1 bora release. Found 
that it does not solve the problem but luckily it didn't hurt. libSDL 
was good candidate since -14 version in 3.1 release enabled back esd for 
audio but it didn't work (even when trying to set SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd). 
In future it would be nice to have some hints what packages are worth 
upgrading (= having bugfixes cross referenced with packages).

This of course does not solve bugs in closed parts. It would still need 
someone to do same job like Markku did for first two OS2007 hacker 
releases. Hopefully current version is in good shape.

It would also need some caution when developing future code to not 
hardcode things for n800 if not strictly needed and branch if this is 
needed. Is there some outcome from the device independance plan Ari 
mentioned? Is there some chance the OS2007 code could be structured in a 
way that makes maintaining n770 branch easier?

As for existing binary packages, is there is a plan to break binary 
compatibility for n800's own good (like using armv6 or VFP code in 
some/all packages)? I hope it is not worth the price of making n770 
incompatible :-)

Frantisek

1. https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=743
2. http://repository.maemo.org/stable/3.1/content_comparison.html
3. 
https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=702&group_id=164&atid=681