[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Tuesday 29 September 2009 11:39:05 Claudio Saavedra wrote:
> If you avoid having symbol clashing by using a different name for the
> widgets in the hypotetical library, if/when these go into hildon you'll
> have to deprecate them and still carry them around for people without
> time to migrate to the hildon variants. And I can tell you that you risk
> having a lot of developers simply not porting to the Hildon variants
> because the "community" versions are good enough for them.

Absolutely.  That was one reason I wanted to make it a little bit harder for 
people to use the community versions, so only the people who really needed 
them would use them before they went into Hildon.  But, as you have pointed 
out, that way lies madness.

So, I think we just have to face this.

> Long term maintenance of a library is complex, and you'll have a lot of
> hassle in the future going that way. On the other hand, there's Nokia
> and their intentions to work together with the community in Hildon.
> You'll have to make a choose between control and maintainability. Of
> course, the implications of Nokia intentions would be good to know
> beforehand.

Input from Nokia would be very welcome (and in my new role I will be asking 
for some).  However, I am sure that there is no way that any more widgets are 
going to be added to Hildon before Fremantle ships.  So, we have to have some 
library (or else everyone who wants to run on Fremantle has to code the 
widgets themselves).  Also, as we want these to be available very quickly, it 
is possible there will be some changes before they are accepted into Hildon 
(the Nokia people are presumably very busy with last minute activities before 
the launch and are not going to be reviewing and approving specs).  

So, in my view, we have no option but to have a community library.  We should 
push to move things as quickly as possible into Hildon (with as few changes 
as possible except in naming) and deprecate them in the community library (at 
which time I would expect the community to lose interest in maintaing them).  
You are certainly right that there will be many applications still using the 
deprecated versions for a long time to come.  But that is no worse (in fact a 
lot better) than many applications hacking together their own widgets so they 
all have different bugs (and different UIs).

Graham