[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Tuesday 29 September 2009 13:49:10 Marius Vollmer wrote:
> ext Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra at igalia.com> writes:
> > 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.
>
> The problem is that after Fremantle ships, libhildon is frozen for a
> long time.  It is prudent to assume that there will be no updates to
> libhildon that applications could rely on for, I dunno, 6 months or so.

Exactly.   Hildon releases will not under the control of even the Hildon team 
(let alone the community): they will be tied to Nokia platform releases and 
Nokia QA schedules.   Due to the signing stuff the community cannot replace 
Hildon even if we wanted to.

> Ok, can't be done in any sane way.  So my best proposal now is to create
> a separate library for the community widgets, without any hope of ever
> moving the widgets into libhildon.

I am missing something.  Why do you (and Claudio) believe that if we start off 
by implementing the widgets in a community library it will be hard to later 
move them into Hildon?  I realise why it will be hard to get people to stop 
using the community versions but is there some reason it will be hard to add 
the community-developed widgets to Hildon?

If there really is a problem then there is only one other alternative I see: 
work in Hildon (or a fork) and allow the community to release an alternative 
to the standard hildon libraries (under a different library name but 
containing the whole hildon library) on our own schedule.  Any apps which 
wanted to use the new features would have to link against the community 
library names instead of the standard library names but the Nokia apps would 
be unchanged.

Graham