View Single Post
Posts: 1,548 | Thanked: 7,510 times | Joined on Apr 2010 @ Czech Republic
#21
Originally Posted by Wikiwide View Post
My interest in Coding Competition would be on fixing-improving-upgrading-old-apps
This is also how would I like to take part - most probably by adding some substantial improvements to modRana, as I have done before in some of the previous competitions (for example offline routing support has been added as part of the most recent competition back in 2012).

If only new apps would be accepted I'm much less likely to take part in the competition due to ongoing projects.

Making it more likely that people take part in the competition
I have an idea that might help get more (especially not long-term Maemo) developers interested in the competition - what about getting the various developer tooling and library upgrades to a usable state ? Or at least properly document the most important of them in a single place.

For example there are various updated components:
But I'm afraid that most of this is still not really production ready, or at least not without all users each manually performing various steps on their N900s before they can run an application making use of the new tools and libraries.

This effectively means that developers willing to join the competition would have to work with really outdated GCC (IIRC Autobuilder has GCC 4.2!!), Python 2.5, an old Q4 version with QtQuick 1.1, etc. They also can't make use of new GCC features, can't use modern Python, can't use Qt 5, can't use PyOtherSide, etc... At least as they actually want people to be able to run their apps. Not to mention the spotty availability of the SDK, fragile autobuilder, finding a distro that can run Python 2.5 these days, etc.

This issues might not be a problem for long term Maemo 5 application developers, as they are already setup & know the existing Maemo 5 technologies and their limitations.

But if we want newcomers with developers experience from other (more up to date) platforms, people porting stuff from outer platforms or even just cross platform application developers to take part in the competition, then I think something really needs to be done about the outdated tooling and library situation. Or else all those people will most likely just throw in the towel.
__________________
modRana: a flexible GPS navigation system
Mieru: a flexible manga and comic book reader
Universal Components - a solution for native looking yet component set independent QML appliactions (QtQuick Controls 2 & Silica supported as backends)
 

The Following 15 Users Say Thank You to MartinK For This Useful Post: