maemo.org - Talk - The End is Coming: What do we do next?

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- - The End is Coming: What do we do next? (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=75782)

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by qole (Post 1072060)

If all you want is a mirror of the repositories, pali did that already.

I don't want just mirroring on a personal level, I want an identically or similarly functioning clone - i.e. autobuilder, the ability to still publish and promote apps, etc. A public server should exist with the mirror and the autobuilder, and if the repositories are pulled, someone should be able to go into their application manager, change the repository url s/maemo.org/[new hypothetical domain name], and everything should resume working for them as normal. Now, like I said, this doesn't have to be done now, but I'm saying it'd be nice if people started considering what powers/mission changes are needed for the Community Council for that to happen if/when it has to happen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by qole

But as I've said before, I think a discussion about community continuation of the infrastructure is premature; the people who are discussing it now may not be the people still around in 18 months.

Well, we do still have 2 council elections minimum before then, so I suppose it can wait.

Quote:

Originally Posted by qole (Post 1072066)

Just to be clear, my position is that we need to start heading for Something Else, as the Maemo community is a "cut flower" -- it will look good in the vase for a while, but it isn't going to grow anymore.

To take your analogy, even a cut flower could be made to regrow roots with some advanced flower-equivalent-of-stem-cell research from the hypothetical future. A less convoluted way of of saying it: I don't agree that it is a 'cut flower'. It's a flower that has had half of its roots chopped off with a shovel stabbed into the ground next to it, but the other half of the roots are healthy and fine. Properly cared for, it can still recover.

Which was my main point with the last part of the above rant - I think there's enough skilled devs (I'll try my hardest to contribute, but I'm not exactly a programming legend here) in the community to pull Maemo 5 out of its current situation where it's tied down by specific binary blobs, and if we rewrote those, Maemo 5 could be rapidly upgraded to much more recent kernel versions and benefit from other MeeGo code. Between MeeGo, and the Cordia project on top of it, you'd have a new direction already, but my point is Maemo 5 need not die when that direction is taken. With sufficient effort it can be taken in that new direction too.

@Texrat: Believe me, I'm by no means one of those who feels the council doesn't communicate enough (like a certain someone who posts the council needs to be communicating more on the Ask The Council thread itself, while council members post around him). I do have difficulty noticing when [Council] topics go up, or when certain meetings/events/etc happen, but now that I think about it that's my fault more so than the council's. Also, I did note the presence of you, Qole, and SD69 in here, and that did not go unappreciated.

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by qole (Post 1072066)

qole there are many ways plants can reproduce, we need a suitable "transplant" for the future, like cordiatab and any device that is open enough.

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

I was writing a decent reply and leant on the wrong key, which closed my browser D'oh!!

Anyway in summary...

@Qole:
The end is not coming. Although, many of our N900s are starting to suffer the signs of age and the servers will be turned off. There is a turn in the road approaching!
You have stirred something deep with this thread. Hopefully through the course of this discussion many Maemo users can and will think about what they want from and to contribute to Maemo now and in the months/years to come.
Thank you for getting the ball rolling. Yes, we need to think about what to do next.

Hopefully we can get a decent number of the N9 users to join us. The bigger we are, the more potential we have. A question worth considering, I think, is: can the Maemo community absorb or be absorbed by the Meego handset community? At heart, there is little difference but most of the users are still here (for the moment). And, if so where will the combined mass 'live'?
Lots of users would like to assist in the preservation and evolution of the Maemo community. However, more structure and sometimes direction are necessary. An idea, that might be worth pursuing is the formation of function-based user-groups, which members can assign themselves to and are represented on TMO/ITT, not just the forum on maemo.org. Each group would be self-governing allowing the council to co-ordinate the groups, not every user!? Aim of groups would be to provided service to each other e.g. get a documenter to work with a programmer to create an intelligible how-to.

Hope that made sense.
:)

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by xerxes2 (Post 1072009)

As mikecomputing said, it is x11 but gtk/qt looks VERY ugly. QML is the way to go for meego/harmattan. If you still want to use gtk/qt you have to modify your app anyway, ie like Fennec, so still requires some work. All I can say is been there done that and qml is the MUCH prefered graphical toolkit to use for meego/harmattan.

Am I reading too much into the above, or is porting existing apps going to be a lot more hassle than hildon-ising used to be?

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by xerxes2 (Post 1072009)

You calm me, I know about "gtk/qt looks VERY ugly" starting from Fremantle on N900. But not any app has problem here and I was just worrying that they disable a regular X11 interface.

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Texrat (Post 1072067)

IF (and maybe only if) we don't unwind talk.maemo.org back to ITT, I propose reaching out to umpcportal for possible migration there. They have a nice forum and address a very broad array of devices and topics all oriented toward MIDs/UMPCs/etc. To me it's a natural, logical fit.

Seriously? First thing I see on that site is something like "Win 7 tablet shipping". I'd think most people on tmo don't like to read about that crap. Are you sure you're the real Texrat? :)

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by lma (Post 1072134)

Am I reading too much into the above, or is porting existing apps going to be a lot more hassle than hildon-ising used to be?

You have to slap a qml ui on to your app so there is a "learning curve" (dunno if that works in english? :)) in the beginning that's true. But I'd think that most coders today target more than one platform anyway so the code is at least semi modular (gui agnostic) already. And I can say it again and again, qml IS the future for meego. GTK and Qt apps will be left in the dust that's for sure.

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mentalist Traceur (Post 1072028)

Because if I recall correctly the schedule for the end of Nokia funding was end of 2012

Correct, according to the last meeting.

Quote:

we need to vote to give the Community Council power to appropriate donations and to perform server renting, site administration, etc, on behalf of the community. If we do this, we also need to consider a demand for transparency - if donations get handled by the Council, we'll need to expect that we know what money is going where and how. IF we do that, in turn we need to think of some financial structure to the 'community' and the Council, in that the money should ideally not be stored in some community member's bank account, etc.

As soon as you start thinking about handling money, you really need to be a legal entity. I think setting that up will be the next council's most important task.

Quote:

I say the sooner we start setting up a mirror of all the extras repositories the better, because we'll have more time to iron out bugs with trying to get autobuilders set up and working.

Or at least we could ask Nemein for documentation on the current setup.

Quote:

Which brings me to the next main point... The binary blobs, particularly the non-freely-distributable ones. Now, Nokians have said in at least one bug-report (I believe it was about getbootstate, prob'ly a source code release request) comment that they have a policy that redistribution of closed binaries / modified scripts for the purpose of developing is accepted behavior in Nokia's eyes.

It was in the BME request (specifically comment 54). It doesn't apply to all closed code, only to parts that come with a specific "distribution for commercial purposes not allowed" copyright notice.

Quote:

Which means we can weasel around at an end-user level, hiding our own stashes of closed source blobs and out local image copies.

Local copies are perfectly fine, as long as you own a device those blobs were meant for, and don't re-distribute.

Quote:

Frankly, if we don't have a resolution to this, eventually Maemo 5 will indeed die

s/5//g

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by egoshin (Post 1072140)

You calm me, I know about "gtk/qt looks VERY ugly" starting from Fremantle on N900. But not any app has problem here and I was just worrying that they disable a regular X11 interface.

Meego/harmattan is running normal xorg-server (x11) so both gtk and qt can be made to work but I wouldn't bet on that Nokia will make that happen. Dunno about gtk (maybe it's not even there) but qt on the n950 dev-kit is just stock desktop qt and looks VERY ugly. Rewriting in qml is the only possible way forward as I see it.

Re: The End is Coming: What do we do next?

Quote:

Originally Posted by xerxes2 (Post 1072148)

Having qt exclusively is a good thing for a vendor, but for developer it means lack of alternative since the vendor also controls the qt framework.