[maemo-developers] Why should I write apps for Maemo?

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Dawid Lorenz wrote:
> On 7 May 2010 09:48, <tero.kojo at nokia.com<mailto:tero.kojo at nokia.com>> wrote:
> Very good point, seriously. Yet I think Marcin had ever better:
> 
>> (Hm. Is Maemo showing its Debian roots?)
> 
> Good attempt for joke but failed. Debian has 'testing' branch which users can
> use, test, report bugs against and got them fixed before release. Maemo does
> not give any of those.

I'd really love if we would have something like that.

(No idea how, I'm not related to how our releases are done.)

There can always be some regression that's slipped through our
(extensive) internal testing.  Some kind of a "monthly developer
snapshot" would help in catching those.


> Releasing "test-and-strictly-developer-aka-geek-oriented" images on regular
> basis would be simply great. Think of it like extras and extras-testing/devel
> - yet not for apps, but full-blown OS images. Normal users should strictly
> stay away from these, but whole bunch of geek folks who imho are the essence
> of Maemo/MeeGo platforms would jump high in joy and that would definitely keep
> guys on both sides of the fence relatively happy. Just my three cents.
> 
> Btw, I am also uber-eager to see PR1.2 on my device, especially after seeing
> what Eero said about Browser and performance, as currently I simply need to
> reboot my N900 every 5-6 days to keep my sanity while using it...

Several of the 3rd party things leak memory and especially if that
happens with a 3rd party in-process home applet, the result is not
pretty in long run...  But you can get rid of the memory usage by
restarting the process.

If the issue is with Browser, just kill it and it will be restarted,
just don't start it too many times in a row or you trigger SW watchdog.
Browser can with long time usage also cause some swap fragmentation
(=> extra swap activity), you can get rid of that also by restarting it.

If the issue is with hildon-home (plugin), you need to stop and start
it with the dsmetool SW watchdog, plain "killall hildon-home" would
cause Home to think that there was some stability issue with applets
and disable 3rd party plugins (to prevent restart/reboot loop).


	- Eero