[maemo-developers] Scratchbox and maemo development (was Re: sb2 wishlist)

[From: Quim Gil]

Oh my.

On Thu, 2007-04-12 at 11:29 +0300, ext Lauri Leukkunen wrote:
> I'm not entirely sure how to interprete this. You're basically saying
> that Nokia is considering dropping scratchbox and the debian
> integration model and replacing it with openembedded?

I wonder how you conclude this from my previous email. 

>  It would be nice
> if you guys would say things as you mean them instead of going around
> giving these vague statements.

I'm saying things as I mean. If I would have an answer I would come to
your office and then send an email here. But I haven't an answer, nor
the rest of the maemo team. Surprise: nor we want to have any answer
about SB/SB2 that hasn't produced together with you.

The sensible thing to do when there is no clear/agreed strategy is to
start defining a clear/agreed strategy. That is what my previous email
tried to do.

>From my understanding Scratchbox2 alone doesn't tell much for a
strategy, specially considering that now maemo is still based on pure
SB. We start having a strategy if we agree on i.e. plans to have a
stable SB2 and plans to migrate there. I expressed this by typing

> - SB vs SB2

But wait, scratchbox is not the only toolkit maemo developers might
need. In fact people out there are already coming up with good ideas,
tests and products to develop applications for maemo without using SB.
Should we ignore them? Should we support them partially? Should we
integrate those tools in the official maemo offer? 

Again, we don't have answers to those questions yet. It doesn't make any
sense to define those answers without the developers producing those
tools / documentations. And in fact it doesn't make any sense to define
those answers without asking the whole maemo community of developers -
which happen to be mostly subscribed to this list. I expressed this by
typing

> - Development via Scratchbox vs development models bypassing SB 


Sorry if the wording wasn't correct. I thought the principle was clear.
We don't want to dump scratchbox. We don't want to rely only on
scratchbox while a(n increasing?) % of maemo development is done with
tools not officially supported. We do want to invest resources where it
makes sense to invest them in order to help developers develop more and
better.

Once this picture is clearer then we can get into details about how to
support the SB2 development and documentation. We could/can even support
SB2 before getting this basic strategy in place. Let's talk about this,
but from a wider perspective this is not a solution per se.

Now, please let's discuss a bit about tools and strategy.

-- 
Quim Gil - http://maemo.org