[maemo-developers] Diablo extras repository proposal

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Ed Bartosh wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 23:36 +0200, ext Tim Teulings wrote:
>> I don't think it is fair to blame the developers without looking for
>> reasons. I'm sure there are reasons for the current situation (some
>> already responded to your mail). The situation needs discussion but not
>> simple blaming. Situation is frustrating but worse could happen.
>>
> The situation needs actions, not discussions. We already had a lot of
> discussions. May be it's now better to act, not to speak. 

If this is about expecting developers immediately (with one month) 
starting to upload their packages, I think this is unrealistic.

If I use my hobby project[1] as an example:
- once I have source packages I could try autobuilder
- currently I've been doing binary packages manually[1] as I have
   few dozen of them (most trivial, but main one complex) and that's
   easier.  Making a real Debian source packages for them is something
   I see as eventually necessary, but secondary to completing features
   I'm interested about (some maemo specific, some general)
- I've been working on those features for the last half a year and
   I expect them to "complete" after summer, then I can start looking
   into source packaging

I.e. I see autobuilder as something very much needed and useful but
things are done in certain order, release happens at the end of feature
development and packaging is something you mainly look into when you're
doing a release.  This time it didn't co-incide with autobuilder.

I doubt many projects have synched their releases with Diablo release
or autobuilder.  Even Ubuntu has hard time convincing others to sync
releases with them, and they have fixed schedule known several years
in advance... :-)


Secondly, I think most developers view packaging as "necessary evil"
and although they would appreciate and like to use services like
autobuilder, they'd prefer somebody else to test & debug it so
that they know it works fine and has the needed features when they
need/want to provide the packages.

Most projects get new users&developers only when they've gotten
to useful & "good enough" state and there's some proof of that
(e.g. from current users).


	- Eero

[1] see:
    http://hatari.sf.net/
    http://koti.mbnet.fi/tammat/hatari/