[maemo-developers] Features to improve the platform

[From: Neil MacLeod]

quim.gil at nokia.com wrote:
> You know about _http://maemo.org/intro/roadmap.html_
> 
> We have been putting more flesh into it at a platform level. We will 
> keep making each entry a link describing details about the feature and 
> facilitating focused discussion around it.
> 
> At the end of the roadmap page there are instruction to submit your own 
> feature requests to be, if approved, roadmapped and developed. We really 
> want to see this process happening. There are some platform related 
> feature requests submitted in bugzilla, but most of them are about end 
> user features. We would like to improve the maemo offer for developers 
> by implementing good and well formulated ideas received from the community.
> 
> So please, if you have ideas for improvement have a look to the 
> procedure in the roadmap page and file our feature requests in bugzilla.
> 
> Quim
> 
> 
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I'm probably not going to be very popular for this post, but hey - I gave up trying to win popularity contests before I left high school... :)

<rant>
Quim - If you want to improve the Maemo platform, stop messing about in public with maemo.org - the stability of this site is chronic, and of late the site has been down more times that it is available (at least that's the impression from here in London, UK).

Right now, Planet is not loading properly (it's been like this for at least the last couple of days - takes forever to load). Bugzilla availability is intermittent, but generally it's more available than Planet. If you must make changes to the site, please do it in a UAT environment where you can test the changes prior to deployment on the public site.

If you want to be taken seriously, the web servers and network infrastructure must be managed with more professionalism than has been apparent over the last few days and weeks - I manage web sites for a living and I'd be out of a job if any of my sites had your kind of availability. I've never seen a public site go down so often for so many different reasons.

If maemo.org ever goes mainstream, you need to have the kind of availability that Microsoft and other vendors provide, and not the kind of availability that you would expect from someone running a web server over their home ADSL connection. New users looking to download the latest apps aren't going to be too impressed when maemo.org is repeatedly offline and the Download pages can't be accessed, or are borked because of a new config change which nobody seems to have tested (as happened the other weekend).

Sorry if this criticism is harsh (and please don't take it personally!) but maemo.org site availability (and often it's performance when it is available) is a running joke and it's incredibly frustrating trying to connect to maemo.org only to find it's down yet again.

It's all very well putting together a great platfom but all your efforts will be wasted if nobody can ever access it.
</rant>

PS. When was the last time Planet updated, is the cron job failing again? Perhaps consider adding a footer "Last updated: dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm UTC" to the Planet page. Also, please add the times to the individual articles in Planet - currently Planet articles show only the abbreviation "UTC" with no time or date visible.