[maemo-developers] App manager open development

[From: Marius Vollmer]

"ext Ryan Abel" <rabelg5 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Oct 30, 2008, at 3:41 AM, Quim Gil wrote:
>
>> Also, would it make sense to have stable/unstable branches for
>> Fremantle? Ideally there would be a stable branch accomplishing all
>> the requirements and deadlines agreed with the Fremantle program, and
>> then a unstable branch installable and testable on the SDK. Relevant
>> additions and changes in unstable ought to be approved first
>> internally before going to stable.
>
> This is one of the things I envisioned the community distribution
> providing, but if it's integrated with Nokia's development process,  
> then all the better. Beta releases are something the community has  
> been after for a long time, so this seems like a great idea. Hopefully  
> the unstable branch will also be installable and testable on devices,  
> though, as the limited platform support of the SDK makes it hard for  
> some people to use it.

Hmm.  I wouldn't use the traditional Debian unstable / testing / stable
setup here for feature experiments.  Unstable/testing/stable is a
integration and release process: packages usually enter it at "unstable"
and eventually appear in stable.

Uploading a package to unstable carries the message "This version of
this package is better than the one we have in stable.  It should
supersede the version in stable immediately, but there might be bugs, so
let's be a bit careful."

It does not carry the message "Hey, here is something cool.  I have know
idea what I should think of it so please give me feedback."

What I would prefer for feature experimentation is a branch of the
package itself: make a new package with a new name and an independent
integration and release schedule.

Thus, in order to keep Nokia's version of the Application manager
separate from the community version, the community should make a
hildon-application-manager-tng package, say, and include it in the
community configurations of the Maemo OS.

The hildon-application-manager-tng would ideally be installable in
parallel with the existing hildon-application-manager package and work
well with it.