[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Claudio Saavedra]

El mar, 29-09-2009 a las 12:51 +0100, Graham Cobb escribió:
> 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.

To be realistic, I don't think you'll have your library ready by the
time Fremantle ships either, so I don't see that as a real problem.

>   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).

I have to be honest and say that I don't like this whole discussion too
much. We are talking all the time about hypotetical things that need to
be done, and what will be done when these hypotetical things get
hypotetically merged, and so on. Too much hypothesis, too little facts.

If I was in your place, I'd start by going the right way and assuming
that everyone has the best intentions for hildon: just clone the hildon
tree, put the widgets in place, work on your clone, get something that
can be shown, file a bug. If for whatever reason these don't get merged
or you see things going too slowly or too much bureaucracy, nothing is
stopping you from diverting then.

I don't see the need to divert before even attempting to join the
project.

Claudio