[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 08 March 2010 13:09:52 Benoît HERVIER wrote:
> >2010/3/8 Thomas Perl <th.perl at gmail.com>:
> >"I don't know if Khertan's problem is technical or political"
>
> The both, as i'm tired of fighting against bug and wrong thumb down in
> QA Testing.

Thomas, I was not aware that there was a problem with the autobuilder, with no 
workround, preventing some packages from building.  That is definitely a 
severe problem and I will certainly push hard for a solution.  Thank you for 
your efforts and your patience.

Benoît, I am very disappointed that you have decided to create a separate 
repository.  I am not sure if you were around in the early days, with the 
770, but the proliferation of repositories made things unmanageable for both 
users and developers, even with the very small number of users we had then. 
The problem was not just finding packages: the worst problems were 
incompatabilites that prevented two packages from even being installed on the 
same system! Re-creating that mess is no solution to even the most serious 
problems we have today.

The Extras process is certainly not perfect, and is much too slow, but it 
largely works.  It is being improved over time but even today it provides 
both developers and users with a great way to match up.  If you drop out of 
Extras then you are not only causing damage to the community (due to the 
proliferation of repositories) but also severely limiting your access to 
users.  Also, as more applications arrive in Extras, users are likely to be 
unwilling to install applications from other sources ("if it is not in Extras 
it must be because it failed the testing process and does something nasty to 
my device").

Most developers are working through the problems we have been having, and 
helping the community to define the testing process more carefully so 
everyone knows what the requirements are.  At the moment, I believe the 
biggest problem is that the process is too slow - but reducing the 10 day 
quarantine would not help much as there is still a shortage of testers to 
progress things.

By the way, just as there is nothing to stop you setting up your own 
repository, there is nothing to stop someone else from taking your (open 
source) code and re-inserting it into Extras.  This is also not ideal either 
for you or for the community (it is likely to be older and buggier code, no 
longer under your control, but much more visible to users).

Graham