[maemo-developers] sbox2 & maemo

[From: Lauri Leukkunen]

On 7/26/07, Carlos Guerreiro <carlos.guerreiro at nokia.com> wrote:
> ext Lauri Leukkunen wrote:
> > Nokia and Maemo community really need to figure out an easy way for
> > developers to use the real hardware and system-mode qemu. Those are the
> > only adequate solutions for testing and debugging of software.
> >
> No doubt system emulation would be a good thing but I wouldn't
> go as far as saying that it's the only adequate solution.
> For application development you can do a lot with the current
> system as you can see in this list and the application catalog.

This just proves that humans can adapt to anything, and even learn to like it.
Personally I find the round-trip of compiling, copying to target hw
and debugging to be slow and requiring manual setup work. As long as I
stick to kernel and initfs I'm fine, I find it a little amusing that
we have better debugging facilities for kernel than for applications
on the target hw.

> > components should be pushed to debian and ubuntu and get those bigger
> > communities involved in their development. One day we will anyway be
> >
> Indeed. When it comes to Hildon that is certainly starting to happen now.

This should be the default mode for most of the stuff we do. Arguing
that we need to keep something in-house for "competitive advantage" is
bollocks. Nokia has a few completely proprietary software platforms
already. No need create another one. Anyway almost all of the
proprietary components in maemo are of dubious quality, maybe there's
a reason for that...

> > running debian/stable with a few custom components on the tablets.
> > That was the aim with this whole debian thing in the first place, remember?
> >
> Well, a few custom components is a big understatement ;-)
> But yes, building on Debian was the thinking. As you know better
> than me we started like that with a snapshot of debian/unstable
> and somehow we never really got serious enough about keeping up
> with that plan.

I hope we can get back to it. Somehow spending a year away from OSSO
made me believe firmly that the only way this Maemo thing can be
valuable in the long run is by being true to its roots. Every single
semi-proprietary component is at least an order of magnitude more
expensive to maintain and they  force ridiculous software architecture
decisions.

/lauri