[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Hello again and sorry for the delay!

I'll try to answer the mails from Claudio and API here. Just too many
mails to reply one by one, so I'm replying to myself :P

First, my proposal was not meant as a affront towards Igalia or the
Hildon team. You have been very helpful in the past and I'm really
grateful for this. If it was received like this, I'm really sorry.

And yes, we talked about color/font choosers already but there have been
no actions. No one had time and I was also doing nothing.
Some days ago the issue came up again in a private discussion, so I was
just thinking we should give it another try. Because, the fact remains
that some of us need/want composite widgets like color/font choosers and
it would be a shame if we duplicate work.

I know you are also open for patches and I'm sure you'll do your best to
include these into Hildon. Of course it would be the best solution to
integrate the community widgets directly with Hildon and this should be
the goal.
But I'm quite sure that, for example, my code wouldn't pass your quality
assurance easily. I'm still quite new to all this stuff and I might just
produce poor code which needs a lot of work or testing.

Because of this I think we should have a garage project which acts as an
incubator for the real thing. It should be super easy to commit code and
to try out the code of others. Now, once a widget in the 'incubator' has
matured enough it could easily be pulled into Hildon and have a happy
life there :)
Whether or not it makes sense to create a library out of the 'incubator'
code or if it should be source only is debatable. I personally don't
care much. For me it's just important that we have a easy way of
sharing. Without bureaucracy or high entry barrier.
Also there might be widgets that you don't want to have in Hildon. There
might be quality concerns or style concerns. I think those widgets still
should have a home. They might be useful for one or two developers.

This was/is really only a proposal. I for myself have not done anything
yet (ok, a bit but not much). So I've not written any color or font
chooser. I just wanted to start the discussion again and see what people
are thinking. And as it turned out Andrew already has some code and is
willing to share that - which is very nice!


So what do you think? Is it a good idea to have an 'incubator'? Should
it be source only or should it include releases as libs?
Are more people interested? Which other widgets do you think are
missing?

There are some more things which I'll answer soon in separate mails :)

Thanks for the discussion!
Conny