[maemo-developers] Fremantle Community SSU

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 19:20, Matan Ziv-Av <matan at svgalib.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Nov 2010, Mohammad Abu-Garbeyyeh wrote:
>
>> New system packages, all of them are based on the latest gitorious
>> sources.
>
> Do you think that the latest gitorious sources are a stable basis? Did you
> inspect the patches that were applied since PR1.3?

Well, we won't know unless we test them, will we? Having said that, it
seems that the Nokia maintainers have been tidying up loose ends -
and, indeed, I hope we'll even see them contributing further now that
they have more free rein to do "what they've always wanted".

>> This is not a proper announcement for the SSU, but more of a prerelease
>> before it's posted on talk.maemo.org, so please,
>> do not post about this on talk.
>
> That does not sound right. It sounds like you are trying to split this small
> community into a few communities.

No, it sounds like getting proper experienced developer feedback when
launching something which has real possibility to lead to a reflash.
In particular, the process with the X Terminal is already a little
clunky (and didn't work for me directly; but did work when I ran the
postinst as root from another X Terminal, something I've already
reported to Mohammad).

> What is your goal in setting up this SSU repository?

AIUI (and Mohammad has the full backing of this council member), the
aim is to ensure that the community SSU is up and running to deliver
bug fixes and improvements to Maemo 5 now that Nokia have (most
likely) completely moved on. The long delay in getting similar set up
for Diablo meant that a lot of the impetus was lost. Now, however, the
N900 development community has yet to move on to Harmattan (and,
indeed, with some of the changes may not entirely) and has many more
eager users. It's the perfect time to start building on the starting
point delivered by Nokia. (For example, I already appreciated the
packaging that hrw did in the past, and Mohammad is now doing, of
Modest with the "proper quoting" and attribution patches the community
provided; but Nokia never shipped).

I can imagine a number of ways of getting involved if you want to
help, including carving out a space on wiki.maemo.org to deal
with/document the issues of and around:

  * Release management - how does testing/QA/release work?
  * Source code management - community SSU has branches in
    gitorious, with "upstream" being the original projects with
    their Nokia maintainers?
  * Collaboration - new mailing list in addition to the IRC
    channel?
  * SSU utility development - improving the enabler, for example.
  * Build process - are these packages being built from tarballs
    by the autobuilder, or manually?

I'd like to thank Mohammad again for his efforts over the last few
months in starting this effort, and continuing with it now that
PR1.3's been released.

Cheers,

Andrew


-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council member