Half-year review of Stskeeps's work as distmaster

[luca]

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

As Stskeeps as already mentioned in the thread, TI severely misrepresented the state of the drivers to be released. Many months worth of volunteer community effort went into getting them into a semi-usable state.

Do you mean that the TI drivers are the only show-stopper and everything else (power management, non 3d display controller, wifi, touchscreen, virtual keyboard, etc.) is perfectly fine?
If so I'd gladly give up the 3d effects to have mer^2/meego/debian/fedora/mandriva running on my n800.

[Straycat]

Originally Posted by Texrat

...

So I'd have to agree with GeneralAntilles that the one area of improvement would be in communication. Make strong use of the available channels, including twitter. Yes, there have been some good updates, especially here, but I think the visibility could have been just a bit higher.

...

I agree too.

Please, people, take in mind most of us are guys who look themselves wiht aparently dead devices in their hands and that's make of us people a little too hungry.

I feel myself like this.

And even when I know the efforts of people here I can't stand to feel that.

Sorry in advance for the times I can't stand myself.

Keep the great, great good job.

And... THANKS.

[qole]

Stskeeps, do you think there'll be a MeeGo for the N8x0? Or do we have all the same problems as with Mer? (Closed drivers, etc).

I think it could happen, seeing as we have recent kernels built for the N8x0 devices now.

I'm very excited about the SSU, as well. It is so good to get a system update that includes rotation and other goodies!

EDIT: I need to comment on this, as well:

Originally Posted by Stskeeps

I was quite surprised to hear that TI announced they had a working driver for N8x0 at Maemo Summit and started planning for this arrival.

Now, imagine my surprise when it turns out they (TI) did not actually try it on anything but their development platforms and not with the N8x0 devices, in fact, had not been developed wit N8x0 nor did they have any to test on?

UNBELIEVABLE.

That explains a lot.

[Stskeeps]

Originally Posted by qole

Stskeeps, do you think there'll be a MeeGo for the N8x0? Or do we have all the same problems as with Mer? (Closed drivers, etc).

I think it could happen, seeing as we have recent kernels built for the N8x0 devices now.

I'm very excited about the SSU, as well. It is so good to get a system update that includes rotation and other goodies!

There is a MeeGo for N8x0, though in it's infancy (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48929). My suggestion is to provide closed binaries RPM packages in a tablets-dev.nokia.com repository like the N900 project does it. So it's not that bad a situation.

A nice photo is .

[qole]

Thanks Stskeeps,

I'm not staying up with the forums and the community like I used to; things in my personal life are a bit too crazy.

I can't say I have any regrets pushing Nokia to hire you. I'm just sorry I wasn't able to contribute more technically. Ping me if my work with shell scripting, chrooting, nested X-Servers, or LXDE can help moving forward.

That screenshot is hilarious, though.

[javispedro]

Originally Posted by qole

UNBELIEVABLE.

That explains a lot.

Actually, before anyone accuses Stskeeps of not reporting about this fact previously, he actually did:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=21697&page=37

...We got over a bad bug that caused the drivers not to work at all on Nokia N8x0s. ...

Note that I also give kudos to him in that thread because when I initially glared upon the drivers I was instantly depressed and believed getting them to do anything at all would imply unmanageable amounts of work.
After a few weeks he had managed to make the drivers do something (it was mostly coincidence that my N810 was the first to render anything -- due to my weird boot setup which seemingly used less memory).

[GeneralAntilles]

Originally Posted by javispedro

Actually, before anyone accuses Stskeeps of not reporting about this fact previously, he actually did:

Indeed, and I hope I didn't imply he's been particularly bad at communication. Far from it, I think he's been rather consistent about reporting and discussing his progress. What I think is missing are the friendly meta-summary blog posts explaining in approachable language what's happening and why.

[buurmas]

Further discussion of the TI driver (and its future) should perhaps continue here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=21697&page=61

[qgil]

I'm surprised by the defensive tone of Stskeeps in his initial post. He is one of the best guys around, picking some of the hottest potatoes few others even dare to touch and being constant on pushing the things he feels important even if they don't bring flashy short term results.

The principles and work he lead at Mer are now embodied in the MeeGo project, and Carsten holds his tiny but noticeable percentage of merit. I see why this is not evident for most people today, but the day MeeGo ships a full stack developed openly and released soon & often using an open build system this will be just self-evident. That day creating MeeGo reconstructed images for different types of hardware will be simple and doable in a way no Mer developer or tester could imagine happening any time soon, even less thanks to an official project pushed by Nokia itself and others in that league.

About opening Nokia proprietary components, there is a lot of source code seeing the light and again Carsten's work can take its own percentage of merit. The driver for this opening is mostly MeeGo and from there anybody can pull and improve that code for that or other purposes.

About the drivers, blaming Carsten about their performance is more or less like blaming Oprah because Obama is not delivering as expected. Still, he has probably done more for the drivers than Oprah for Obama's tough challenges.

And many more positive things. Dude, I'm still reading that first post with that tone and wondering what's going on. You are doing a lot of work that is interesting for several people. You're exposed, and in such situations you will always get congratulations and flames, with plenty of silent backing in between. Listen to criticism but don't be too obsessed about it, especially when your instincts and expertise tell you that you are doing quite well considering all the conditionants. You bet I have learned this not by reading it in a book.

Clear conclusion for Carsten and everybody: we are really happy funding his community work and will keep doing so without hesitation. He is working in pretty exciting stuff and it's everybody's interest to keep his motivations in good shape. If there are things you see that could be improved try asking him where could you help improving those things.

[Stskeeps]

Originally Posted by qgil

And many more positive things. Dude, I'm still reading that first post with that tone and wondering what's going on. You are doing a lot of work that is interesting for several people. You're exposed, and in such situations you will always get congratulations and flames, with plenty of silent backing in between. Listen to criticism but don't be too obsessed about it, especially when your instincts and expertise tell you that you are doing quite well considering all the conditionants. You bet I have learned this not by reading it in a book.

Thank you for the kind words. I think the post should have more reference to the context it was made in. The problem was that a lot of frustration exists/existed in the community regarding how things went with the N8x0s and Mer.

I can understand those frustrations and I chose this medium to help getting them talked about, discussed, etc, instead of being re-iterated constantly in a lot of different threads where they are more noise than signal. In here, they're on topic.

Circumstances have changed a lot now, with MeeGo and all. And tomorrow I still have to work for and with this community - and it was time to clear the air so we can work together on making things better. My own role is also changing, so it was a good time to hear what is working and what is not to help shape future work.

My motivations are actually higher after all the comments as I feel like we have cleared the air, discussed things, reflected and sketched out what people would like and where and how to go. There might be more discussions to be had, but I'll gladly take them - kept in frustrations is never constructive.