Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-11 Thread Eero Tamminen

Hi,

On 10/04/2011 03:08 PM, ext Tom Swindell wrote:

OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages locally and
on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be polluted by
whatever packages a developer has installed and makes dependency
tracking a bit harder IMO.


OBS and Scratchbox aren't competitors or replacements for each other.
OBS is a package building tool, Scratchbox is a cross-building tool
for distros.  I.e. their main focus is completely different.

As to cross-building in OBS, I would recommend it to adopt SB2 as
what I've understood of its current cross-compilation solution looks
like an incomplete re-implementation of SB1 i.e. either much slower
or causing much more issues with builds.


Btw. Despite name, scratchbox v1 and v2 don't have about anything
else in common except the problem they solve, distro cross-building.

SB1 problem is that its host tools are basically a hard to maintain
distro in itself and therefore typically out of sync with the target
packages, which sometimes cases issues.

Whereas SB2 is designed just to use x86 version of the packages
to speed up build of non-x86 packages, and have fine-grained
control on how all this works.


- Eero

Here's some more info on SB2:
https://maemo.gitorious.org/scratchbox2
http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/scratchbox2
http://lists.scratchbox.org/pipermail/scratchbox-users/
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-11 Thread Eero Tamminen

Hi,

On 10/04/2011 12:06 PM, ext Jon Nordby wrote:

Yes, one would want Scratchbox or similar in addition to what OBS
provides. However, there is nothing that prevents Scratchbox from being
used together with RPM and an RPM based distro is there?


You need some support for RPM tools in SB and OBS would need to prefix
commands with sbox or sb2 depending on which SB version is used.



Don't go around trying to changing everything if what you're missing is
just Scratchbox.


I wouldn't say just, distro cross-building is surprisingly hairy
problem, it can sprout warts years after you thought it was nailed
down.  Anyway, SB is package build system agnostic.

I would recommend using SB v2.  With that you just need to select
suitable packages from the distro to accelerate and adding path
mapping rules for binaries in them, whereas with SB v1 you need
to support SB specific host tools distro in addition to package
management devkit.


- Eero
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-06 Thread d4lamar
Hi to all,
I'm only a lurker of Meego mailing lists and I have never contributed
to the project, but this time I would like to write some words about.

 * That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.

I think that this point in Mer Project or in any other branch/fork of
Meego is to be corrected.

Vendors come and vendors go, they don't care about Community as long
as they can use it for their purposes and for me this was the main
problem with Maemo, Moblin, Meego and if their strategies change they
drop their products and their Communities.

This approach didn't work. We have to reach a critical mass of users
as soon as we can, then vendors will return to Community using
Community work for their projects.

I think we have to focus on end-users, we have to get users as fast as
we can, and then they will be new testers and other developers come to
help these users, Community is not a vendor that fears to burn its new
brand with an early release.

We have to learn from other successful opensource projects. Firstly we
have to hack the most common devices on the market, users unsatisfied
with their platform would like to try a different one without buying a
new device. Then we have to get their feedbacks and trying to improve.

We have to define specific requirements an user would search on this
new platform, we have to define our target users and build a solution
for the most of them.

When we will have users, vendors will come to produce using our work
for their new devices.

These are my 2 cents, sorry for bothering.

Best Regards,
d4lamar
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-06 Thread Carsten Munk
2011/10/6 d4lamar d4la...@gmail.com:
 * That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.

 I think that this point in Mer Project or in any other branch/fork of
 Meego is to be corrected.

 Vendors come and vendors go, they don't care about Community as long
 as they can use it for their purposes and for me this was the main
 problem with Maemo, Moblin, Meego and if their strategies change they
 drop their products and their Communities.

So, let me describe a bit what I mean with vendor. What we're trying
to establish is a common, streamlined Linux/Qt core for others to
build on top of. For end users, this is horribly boring - the code on
it's own would just show a blinking cursor/a xterm/a qml demo

A vendor, in our view, is someone who takes the core, mixes it with
their own bits, makes it into some kind of a product. As an example,
this could be Plasma Active user experience, taking the core, some
hardware adaptations and their own UX. It could be a small business
that makes bus displays. It could be a hobbyist at home who doesn't
want to bother making his own distribution and just want to show a
clock on his LCD. But we're not the people who deliver the final
experience.

In their work, they'll come up with improvements to the core and
proposed requirements for the core.

With a proper, openly governed and discussed requirements/roadmap
process, we move ahead while maintaining quality and focus. I'll
expect those handling the requirements management to be objective in
their work.

My primary motivation about the not end users is the fact that this
practically ruined MeeGo, the personality split between just a core
and look, shiny netbook ui - the core was actually fantastic for
building things with, but the reference UX'es and end user's reviews
caused it to be perceived badly.

Instead, I'd like to see the amazing things people can build on top.
So many possibilities, really (just go look at the videos of what
people did with the MeeGo + Nokia N900 hardware adaptations)

We have chosen to move out the hardware adaptations and UX'es out of
the core, into the community surrounding it, to get rid of a lot of
politics - to concentrate on what's technically good and benefits us
all - not having to maintain our own mobile distribution ourselves.

 These are my 2 cents, sorry for bothering.

An opinion isn't bothering :)

BR
Carsten Munk
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-06 Thread Graham Cobb
On Thursday 06 October 2011 07:33:24 Carsten Munk wrote:
 We have chosen to move out the hardware adaptations and UX'es out of
 the core, into the community surrounding it, to get rid of a lot of
 politics - to concentrate on what's technically good and benefits us
 all - not having to maintain our own mobile distribution ourselves.

I think I understand your point but there is a big danger there.  My day job 
is marketing.  And there is a lot of marketing involved in building an open-
source community.  In order to get contributors, or to get vendors to use you, 
you need to be seen as viable and successful.

And a lot of that is tied up with end-users: the blogs and web sites will be 
talking about you if users are talking about you.  Your strategy is going to 
require that you have a successful and visible vendor project and, even 
then, you need to make sure that people are mentioning your core when talking 
about the associated project.

My personal view (which is partly based on my marketing job) is that you have 
to start off focused on a very visible end user experience in order to get the 
project the necessary publicity.  For your own governance reasons you will 
probably want to make sure the split between core and vendor is clear, but 
from the outside world they have to look like one to start with.

The bottom line is that many potential community members will be doubtful that 
your project can be successful, unless you can show them a working (preferably 
great) end user experience (including hardware).  Many projects have been and 
gone, either sponsored by big companies (we are all familiar with those!) or 
purely hobbyist (e.g. Cordia now that the Cordia Tab seems dead).  If the 
Cordia Tab was going to happen then Cordia might have been the viable end user 
project to get you the publicity but without hardware it seems to be going 
nowhere as well.

Graham
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-06 Thread Ville M. Vainio
On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 12:40 PM, Graham Cobb g+me...@cobb.uk.net wrote:

 My personal view (which is partly based on my marketing job) is that you have
 to start off focused on a very visible end user experience in order to get the
 project the necessary publicity.  For your own governance reasons you will

Yeah, people need something cool on their devices to bother trying Mer
in the first place, provide feedback and maybe even join the project.

I'm sort of hoping Plasma Active could play a big part in this.
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-05 Thread Samuel Stirtzel
Hi,
sorry for re-sending this Jeremiah, but I've missed that this mail was
not sent to the list, my bad.

2011/10/4 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com:
...



 Can a mobile
 segment distro like MeeGo be really compared with a desktop segment
 distro like e.g. embedded Ubuntu? (This is not relative to your
 message but a general rhetorical question.)

 I don't understand what you mean by segment here. And I also don't
 understand what you're referring to with embedded Ubuntu.

What I meant is that a embedded desktop OS targets another audience
than the embedded mobile OS (or in other terms a different market
segment).

Well I'm sorry for using the term embedded Ubuntu, I've assumed that
others refer to projects like Linaro-Ubuntu [1], the TI-OMAP Ubuntu
[2] and in general ARM Ubuntu as embedded Ubuntu too.



 Well I didn't use embedded Debian as example because Emdebian mailing
 lilsts seem to be pretty dead [2].

 Embedian is very much alive. More
 here: http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/12/#emdebian

Oh I see, I just wondered because the mailing lists seems to endure a recession.


  Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux
  distros
  (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays
  fragmentation
  is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.
  I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with
  retracing
  your path back to the main highway.

 There seems to be much standardization work going on in the Yocto
 Project / OpenEmbedded Core (see [3], also Carsten already mentioned
 the Yocto Project in context of governance), anyone evaluated it?

 Yocto is very interesting indeed, as is OpenEmbedded, though the claim is
 that Yocto is open embedded done right. But for the purposes of a distro I
 don't think Yocto is the silver bullet people are looking for. Firstly, it
 seems focused on Intel Atom BSPs and overall seems designed to help in board
 bring-up. Yes you can create a complete distro, but like a misused OBS
 repository, creating your own complete distro is not a good idea. Unless of
 course yours is THE ONE.

Your statement about Yocto is right, but OpenEmbedded isn't
OpenEmbedded anymore, alot has changed since this statement was true.
OpenEmbedded Core (the new OpenEmbedded) and the Yocto Project merged
their efforts and created an unified code base (see [3] and [4]), also
OpenEmbedded Core + Yocto supports a larger audience (see [5] for the
approved list of BSP layers).

In OSS systems there should not be a THE ONE distribution, for end
users this is out of the question, they might not want to create their
own distro, but (IMHO) developers should not be restricted in this
direction.



 The Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded was discussed before in the IVI
 mailing list (see [4]), but it lacks any technical explanations and
 arguments why it cannot be used / or get adapted, also OpenEmbedded
 progressed into the new OpenEmbedded Core Project (the next release is
 just one step away).

 https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/FAQ
 OpenEmbedded is widely used in commercial embedded systems. Those systems
 tend to not be open source systems and end up costing lots of money.
 Regards,
 Jeremiah

Sorry I don't get your point here, no offense but if I would say:
Debian is widely used in commercial desktop systems. Would your
statement be the same?
If you care about the patches, i see quite an amount of users sending
patches back to OpenEmbedded Core and Yocto.


[1] https://launchpad.net/linaro-ubuntu/+milestone/11.09
[2] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ti-omap
[3] 
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2011/03/yocto-project-aligns-technology-openembedded-and-gains-corporate-co
[4] http://www.yoctoproject.org/projects/openembedded-core
[5] http://www.openembedded.org/wiki/LayerIndex

--
Regards
Samuel
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-05 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Stefan Werden stefan.wer...@open-slx.dewrote:

 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com hat am 4. Oktober 2011 um
 20:42
 geschrieben:

  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Stefan Werden
  stefan.wer...@open-slx.dewrote:
 
   Hi,
  
   switching to debian would mean making a complete new projekt.
 
 
  Nope, it would merely mean adding software to the Debian project, it
  wouldn't require a new project at all. Debian would host the
 infrastructure
  (it has its own IRC, build farm, hosting, project software, email lists,
  funding, non-profit status, social contract, shell accounts, git server,
 svn
  server, well, you get the picture.) You could turn Mer into a Debian
 blend
  for example: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends or you could become
 a
  Debian derivative: http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census
 
  Debian derivatives currently dominate the Linux landscape. Of the top
 four
  distros on Distro Watch, three of them are deb based. This means you get
 a
  huge development ecosystem when you use debs, as well as a lot of users.



 Distrowatch are server and dektop disties. The special thing in MeeGo was
 that
 the focus was on emerging devices.


And how exactly did it do that? By using Connman? By using an embedded
Linux kernel? Btrfs? By being small? What exactly makes MeeGo different
from other desktop distros? Or was it just a little bit of marketing?


 So this makes it special, because it does not
 need to care about the old stuff. So bcoming a debian flavour feels not
 really
 like an option to me.


That's fine. It doesn't have to be an option for you. It should be described
as a potential option for others on this list however since they may not
have made up their minds yet and the FUD that is being thrown about here is
misleading.

Regards,

Jeremiah
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-05 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 9:39 AM, Samuel Stirtzel
s.stirt...@googlemail.com wrote:

 2011/10/4 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com:

  Can a mobile
  segment distro like MeeGo be really compared with a desktop segment
  distro like e.g. embedded Ubuntu? (This is not relative to your
  message but a general rhetorical question.)
 
  I don't understand what you mean by segment here. And I also don't
  understand what you're referring to with embedded Ubuntu.

 What I meant is that a embedded desktop OS targets another audience
 than the embedded mobile OS (or in other terms a different market
 segment).

 Well I'm sorry for using the term embedded Ubuntu, I've assumed that
 others refer to projects like Linaro-Ubuntu [1], the TI-OMAP Ubuntu
 [2] and in general ARM Ubuntu as embedded Ubuntu too.

No reason to apologize! I was just not certain what you were referring to. :)

 
   Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux
   distros
   (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays
   fragmentation
   is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.
   I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with
   retracing
   your path back to the main highway.
 
  There seems to be much standardization work going on in the Yocto
  Project / OpenEmbedded Core (see [3], also Carsten already mentioned
  the Yocto Project in context of governance), anyone evaluated it?
 
  Yocto is very interesting indeed, as is OpenEmbedded, though the claim is
  that Yocto is open embedded done right. But for the purposes of a distro I
  don't think Yocto is the silver bullet people are looking for. Firstly, it
  seems focused on Intel Atom BSPs and overall seems designed to help in board
  bring-up. Yes you can create a complete distro, but like a misused OBS
  repository, creating your own complete distro is not a good idea. Unless of
  course yours is THE ONE.

 Your statement about Yocto is right, but OpenEmbedded isn't
 OpenEmbedded anymore, alot has changed since this statement was true.

 OpenEmbedded Core (the new OpenEmbedded) and the Yocto Project merged
 their efforts and created an unified code base

I tried to point that out by saying Yocto is 'open embedded done
right.' But I guess I was unclear. From what I understand bitbake is
still at the heart of both these projects and that is a pretty
interesting piece of technology.


 (see [3] and [4]), also
 OpenEmbedded Core + Yocto supports a larger audience (see [5] for the
 approved list of BSP layers).

 In OSS systems there should not be a THE ONE distribution, for end
 users this is out of the question, they might not want to create their
 own distro, but (IMHO) developers should not be restricted in this
 direction.

But that is precisely the point. To serve end users you need a
consistent, easy to use platform, with a large ecosystem of developers
to create new applications. This is one of the reasons why Debian is
useful: its foundation is that it puts users first. From the Debian
Social Contract; We will be guided by the needs of our users and the
free software community.

Yocto puts developers first which is great - but it doesn't make for a
consistent, easy to use platform, with a large ecosystem. It creates
different chunks which are little Linux stacks which one places over
the layers which seem to be like Linaro Hardware Packs, i.e. BSPs
and drivers. These chunks function as a Linux distro, you can add
packages and UIs and all kinds of amazing stuff, but you have no
community. You have no ecosystem, you don't scale.

 
  The Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded was discussed before in the IVI
  mailing list (see [4]), but it lacks any technical explanations and
  arguments why it cannot be used / or get adapted, also OpenEmbedded
  progressed into the new OpenEmbedded Core Project (the next release is
  just one step away).
 
  https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/FAQ
  OpenEmbedded is widely used in commercial embedded systems. Those systems
  tend to not be open source systems and end up costing lots of money.
  Regards,
  Jeremiah

 Sorry I don't get your point here, no offense but if I would say:
 Debian is widely used in commercial desktop systems. Would your
 statement be the same?

No offense taken. I was purposely vague because I don't want to
publicly deride commercial Linux companies and other hardware
companies that use OE and Yocto.

The difference for me is that commercial Linux companies see Linux as
a technology. In my mind, that is a misunderstanding. Linux is a
kernel, combined with a userland (Android, GNU, etc.) and a license
group. This combination is where the magic occurs because it enforces
useful changes back into GNU/Linux distros and encourages a thriving
ecosystem. This thriving ecosystem is what makes Linux run on
everything from MIPS, to Xeon, to ARM M5, to A11, from old desktops to
the world's fastest computers, from phones to satellites.

 If you care about the 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-05 Thread Si Howard
Again, I agree with the project, if Mer can resurrect Maemo/MeeGo then I 
am all for it!


On 04/10/2011 08:57, Timo Jyrinki wrote:

ma, 2011-10-03 kello 19:09 +0100, Si Howard kirjoitti:

I'm for that! Wasn't the Mer project part of the Maemo 5.0 porting to
the Nokia N8X0 platform?

That's one way of putting it, but it was indeed about reconstructing
Maemo so that it worked as a whole distribution. That then made possible
to try to get newer Maemo components working on older tablets purely as
a community effort.

So more like Maemo 5.0 porting to the Nokia N8X0 platform was a part of
the Mer project, not the other way around :)

-Timo



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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-05 Thread Timo Jyrinki
2011/10/5 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com:
 Distrowatch are server and dektop disties. The special thing in MeeGo was
 that
 the focus was on emerging devices.

 And how exactly did it do that? By using Connman? By using an embedded
 Linux kernel? Btrfs? By being small? What exactly makes MeeGo different
 from other desktop distros? Or was it just a little bit of marketing?

I agree with Jeremiah here. MeeGo really was a lot more pain to get
slimmed down with its actually desktop distro legacy and for example
package dependencies than with Debian. Maemo was the actual embedded
OS, but MeeGo never got to reach it.

That said, I do believe there is a lot of room and need for Mer, and
potentially Tizen (hopefully fully usable by Mer and others) when it
actually materializes, simply because it tries to continue MeeGo as is
but fixing the problems mostly everyone agrees with - MeeGo was not
lean core at any point, and the community, decision and communication
aspects sucked in many ways. Doing so gets the existing MeeGo
community people to continue, while any other one choice like Debian
(advertised by me among else), openSUSE (advertised by Jon among
else), Yocto or other would not get all the same people on-board. With
individuals it can be about simple things like familiriaty with tools,
and OBS does rock. The important thing is to do something that matters
(to you), and if possible do it in a way that everyone can benefit.

The lesson with MeeGo here should be not to put all eggs into one
basket. I'm a multi-distro person myself, and see strong value in
distro-previously-called-MeeGo, Ubuntu, Yocto etc. in addition to
Debian which I think rules the most broadly in its operation and
scope.

-Timo
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread harri.hakulinen
Carsten, David and Robin,

Thank you very much for this proposal and work already done and started. This 
single post alone convinces me that we have not wasted any work on MeeGo (ce), 
and that it in fact will have bright future ahead, no matter of the name of the 
project , the products based on it or possible companies involved in it.

This very clearly is the best part of OSS promise, when one (business) model 
changes, the projects and the best people continue with the code and  their 
learning of the old model.

I sincerely hope that people understand that your Mer project is not against 
anything or anyone. If companies don't understand the value of your proposal in 
this round, for sure they will in next one. 
 
Have a happy hacking, and see you around.

Br,
//Harri

-Original Message-
From: meego-dev-boun...@meego.com [mailto:meego-dev-boun...@meego.com] On 
Behalf Of ext Carsten Munk
Sent: 3. lokakuuta 2011 9:01
To: meego-dev; meego-comm...@meego.com
Subject: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for 
MeeGo

Hi all,

MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? - Maemo, 
Moblin?

We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo, Moblin - 
and now Tizen.

A lot of proposals have been put forward:
* Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
* Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian, openSUSE, 
etc)
* Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other interested 
communities to work with Tizen.

Our solution is the Mer Project:

How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration community for 
devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then contributions will end up 
the same place, no matter if it's Tizen, Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.

Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called Mer, short 
for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open mobile platform 
through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a open platform. We were big 
on open governance, open development and open source.

For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios of change 
in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open, it's time to talk 
about what we as a community can make happen next.
To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or anti-Intel project, 
but a direction we can and will go in - we strongly want to collaborate with 
Tizen and Intel.

We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the hacker 
community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new vendor device 
that a single hacker could do it for their device.

We decided to approach the problems and potential scenarios of change in MeeGo 
in the light of the reallocation of resources caused by what is now known as 
the Tizen work. There have not been any Trunk/1.3 releases since August and 
Tablet UX has totally stalled. What really works (and works quite well) is the 
Core. It's time to take the pieces and use them for reconstruction.

We have some clear goals:

* To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
* That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
* To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and
tools: make life easy for them
* To have a device oriented architecture
* To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
* To innovate in the mobile OS space

Now we'd like to talk a bit about what specific initiatives we propose to take:

0) Becoming MeeGo 2.0

Our work has the intended goal of being MeeGo 2.0 - and we hope that the Linux 
Foundation will see our work as a worthy succesor within the MeeGo spirit. We'd 
like to provide ability to be Tizen compliant, i.e.
supporting HTML5/WAC and the application story there and feed back to that 
ecosystem.

1) Modularity. A set of architectural components for making devices.

Rather than dictate the architecture we will support collaboration and the 
flexibility to easily access off-the-shelf components for device projects. 
Component independence permits focused feature and delivery management too.

Initially the project will be developing a Core for basing products on and will 
split UX and hardware adaptations out into seperate projects within the 
community surrounding the Core.

2) Working towards an ultra-portable Linux + HTML5/QML/JS Core for building 
products with.

We have already taken MeeGo and cut it into a set of 302 source packages that 
can boot into a Qt UI along with standard MeeGo stack pieces. This work can be 
seen already at [2] and we've made our first release and have had it booting on 
devices already[6].

To ease maintenance, we would like to encourage people to participate in the 
Core work of the Tizen project, utilizing their work where we can in Mer: why 
do the same work twice? Even if Tizen 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Timo Jyrinki
ma, 2011-10-03 kello 19:09 +0100, Si Howard kirjoitti:
 I'm for that! Wasn't the Mer project part of the Maemo 5.0 porting to
 the Nokia N8X0 platform?

That's one way of putting it, but it was indeed about reconstructing
Maemo so that it worked as a whole distribution. That then made possible
to try to get newer Maemo components working on older tablets purely as
a community effort.

So more like Maemo 5.0 porting to the Nokia N8X0 platform was a part of
the Mer project, not the other way around :)

-Timo


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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com
Hello,

I think one of the things with the MeeGo was that it was a downgrade in
development environment, CI systems and everything from our
Maemo. All that has been made for debian based distro and the change to the
rpm does not make slightest sense. The debian based distro and everything
that surrounds it has much longer history on this context and it is that
simple. I joined the team that became later Maemo already in 2004. Back then
scratchbox was new invention, but still today it has no replacement which
would be better or equal. Before scratchbox we were compiling with ext hard
drive connected to Nokia 770 proto (and ran the gcc on the arm). After
scratchbox came, there was a great convenience improvement. Killing
scratchbox without a replacement (OBS is not a replacement!) is not very
good choice.

This is just my 0.02 cents. I would think it should be done like this:

- Take the debian based distro and development environment (that works) as a
basis. It works. Look at Harmattan and all previous Nokia Maemo devices. And
there is scratchbox, which is open source, and even if it would not be
perfect, it works and is great for developing and cross compiling anything
on your machine, not needing some OBS build service to build your package
when you can compile on your computer. So forget RPM, is number 1 key to the
success. And even if the intended hardware would be something else than ARM,
it does not matter. This is my recommendation. Do whatever you want, but I
think this would be the right thing to do at this point.

- Number 2 key to the success is a blazingly superb UI. And this is not even
very hard one but takes some work. Community MeeGo has not had a meaningful
UI, has always had poor graphics (or missing graphics on Nokia's code drops,
e.g. seeing our duicontrolpanel on MeeGo-MeeGo installation instead of
Harmattan is a whole different experience than seeing it on Harmattan
device), poor or missing icons and does not really shine in any way when
compared to iOS, Android or Harmattan. But good news, there is a easy
technology to make a superb UI framework rapidly, QML. It needs some work,
needs to be consistent UI concept, excellent graphics (which have a meaning,
if you look closely icons on Harmattan and the colors of applications, they
are different from app to app because the apps are color coded - this kind
of attention does matter). But QML is really awesome for creating things
fast and the QML based swipe tutorial on Harmattan (when you boot your N9
first time) shows that it can be done with QML (as the swipe tutorial
simulates the Harmattan UI framework). I think QML is a key to developing
any UI concept fast whatever the Mer wants to be.

- Number 3: Thou shalt not restrict it to one single technology. I think
restricting to HTML5 only or QML only would be a bad idea. Instead a support
of choices which work for different purposes is a key to success. Things
which do not need to be replaced should not be replaced, they can be
substituted, but not replaced.

- Many of the lower layers have been already open sourced by companies and
it is just about utilizing them and doing the top of the cake right. There
are some missing pieces, but filling the gaps should not be impossible. It
is some work to do, but it may not be overwhelmingly big work.

With some gaps filled on UI, and then lower layers, this distro could be
easily superior to e.g. Android. It is another question if someone wants to
use it, but at least would be a fun thing.

Best Regards,
Karoliina


On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:

 Hi all,

 MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
 Maemo, Moblin?

 We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
 Moblin - and now Tizen.

 A lot of proposals have been put forward:
 * Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
 * Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian,
 openSUSE, etc)
 * Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

 The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
 interested communities to work with Tizen.

 Our solution is the Mer Project:

 How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration
 community for devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then
 contributions will end up the same place, no matter if it's Tizen,
 Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.

 Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called
 Mer, short for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open
 mobile platform through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a
 open platform. We were big on open governance, open development and
 open source.

 For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios
 of change in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open,
 it's time to talk about what we as a community can make happen next.
 To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
I just think it would have been better if we (The Nokia linux
organization and the fans) did not have to go through the MeeGo
hurdle, and as you say in detail, look at harmattan and how slick and
beautiful is as a product. (I use it in N950 as my everyday phone and
no *other* OS/ device even comes close to the experience I get.

However, I understand from Carsten that all of our code is already in
RPM and hence this is why Mer is going to use it, I am wondering what
would it take to just use Harmattan as the basis for Mer now and keep
the tradition and the rocking dev tools (Scratchbox is indeed, a cross
compilation environment OOTB that as an embedded OS maker, I've yet
come to see in its simplicity and support to the developer from any
other platform / distro and/or vendor).

If you ask me, Harmattan is the way to go , asking to yet open closed
parts or replace them with open parts , put a UX on top following the
Swipe style if we have a UX team (because Mer is supposed to be a thin
base layer nothing more). And just do it. Then Nokia (In my deepest
hopes) could re-use it when perhaps Linux will find its way back there
as a smartphone platform.


On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com
karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com wrote:
 would be better or equal. Before scratchbox we were compiling with ext hard
 drive connected to Nokia 770 proto (and ran the gcc on the arm). After
 scratchbox came, there was a great convenience improvement. Killing
 scratchbox without a replacement (OBS is not a replacement!) is not very
 good choice.

+1 .

 on your machine, not needing some OBS build service to build your package
 when you can compile on your computer. So forget RPM, is number 1 key to the
 success. And even if the intended hardware would be something else than ARM,
 it does not matter. This is my recommendation. Do whatever you want, but I
 think this would be the right thing to do at this point.

+1

 - Number 2 key to the success is a blazingly superb UI. And this is not even
 very hard one but takes some work. Community MeeGo has not had a meaningful
 UI, has always had poor graphics (or missing graphics on Nokia's code drops,
 are different from app to app because the apps are color coded - this kind
 of attention does matter). But QML is really awesome for creating things
 fast and the QML based swipe tutorial on Harmattan (when you boot your N9
 first time) shows that it can be done with QML (as the swipe tutorial
 simulates the Harmattan UI framework). I think QML is a key to developing
 any UI concept fast whatever the Mer wants to be.

++1

 - Number 3: Thou shalt not restrict it to one single technology. I think
 restricting to HTML5 only or QML only would be a bad idea. Instead a support
 of choices which work for different purposes is a key to success. Things
 which do not need to be replaced should not be replaced, they can be
 substituted, but not replaced.

+++1 .

Problem is that how do you make all of the technologies appear
integrative to the platform, as Rich Green once noted about apps and
WP7 that an app there does not feel different to the core OS UX. I
could argue that we should support GTK , Vala, Mono stuff and the list
goes on...but how to make it look organic?

 - Many of the lower layers have been already open sourced by companies and
 it is just about utilizing them and doing the top of the cake right. There
 are some missing pieces, but filling the gaps should not be impossible. It
 is some work to do, but it may not be overwhelmingly big work.

I have no idea about this - can anybody really estimate the amount of
work needed?

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Robin Burchell
Hi Karoliina,

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com
karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com wrote:
 Killing scratchbox without a replacement (OBS is not a replacement!) is not 
 very
 good choice.

MeeGo was theoretically usable in qemu, unfortunately, I don't think a
lot of effort was put into that direction. There is also MADDE,
although as you probably know, that isn't very useful unless you're a
simple application developer - a more complex beast like the settings
application wouldn't really be easy to use there unless you did some
hacking around in the rootfs, injecting your own needed libs, etc.

This is definitely something that I imagine will be looked into around
the context of Mer - Mer of old had images that could easily be shoved
into virtualbox, etc, and they made life a lot easier.

OBS is a very useful tool, just not for the purposes you were
apparently forced to use it for. I've used it for the commit, push
package, wait for build failure type development cycle as well, and I
agree, it's far from optimal - but for easily making heavily
customised distributions, OBS is great.

 e.g. seeing our duicontrolpanel on MeeGo-MeeGo installation instead of
 Harmattan is a whole different experience than seeing it on Harmattan
 device),

snip

 But good news, there is a easy technology to make a superb UI framework 
 rapidly, QML.
 It needs some work,  needs to be consistent UI concept, excellent graphics 
 (which have a meaning,

The technology is, at the end of the day, not that important (though I
agree that QML makes life a lot easier) - at the end of the day, you
can have the best written UI in the world, and it will still look like
complete and utter crap without decent theming.

Hopefully we can poke some of the awesome graphical people around like
wazd to give us a hand with some of this.

 - Many of the lower layers have been already open sourced by companies and
 it is just about utilizing them and doing the top of the cake right. There
 are some missing pieces, but filling the gaps should not be impossible.

One of the missing gaps, at least on Handset CE, is the settings
application. As you point out, it is not visually pleasing, it has
flickering text (!! Wifi before changing to the actual text), and
other issues which make it a bit pailful to use.

Given your experience with it, would you like to dedicate some time to
making it more usable, perhaps even doing some thinking on how to
approach it from the QML world?

BR,

Robin
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jon Nordby

On 10/04/11 11:07, Sivan Greenberg wrote:

I just think it would have been better if we (The Nokia linux
organization and the fans) did not have to go through the MeeGo
hurdle, and as you say in detail, look at harmattan and how slick and
beautiful is as a product. (I use it in N950 as my everyday phone and
no *other* OS/ device even comes close to the experience I get.

The slick parts are sadly not very open.


However, I understand from Carsten that all of our code is already in
RPM and hence this is why Mer is going to use it, I am wondering what
would it take to just use Harmattan as the basis for Mer now and keep
the tradition and the rocking dev tools (Scratchbox is indeed, a cross
compilation environment OOTB that as an embedded OS maker, I've yet
come to see in its simplicity and support to the developer from any
other platform / distro and/or vendor).
Yes, one would want Scratchbox or similar in addition to what OBS 
provides. However, there is nothing that prevents Scratchbox from being 
used together with RPM and an RPM based distro is there?


Don't go around trying to changing everything if what you're missing is 
just Scratchbox.


--
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com
Software Developer, Openismus GmbH - www.openismus.com
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Robin Burchell
Hi Sivan ( others),

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.com wrote:
 Again, why don't we forget reinventing the infrastructure in the price
 of using debs (which is a known a loved format for embedded computing
 everywhere, and since RPM and DEBs are just a way of packaging and not
 really an issue if we chose one or another, just use Launchpad like
 Linaro does?)

Talk is cheap; actions talk much more loudly.

If you (or others) think this is a good approach, then by all means,
go for it, do some work and get a proof of concept showing how ( why)
it is better without losing the ability to easily seperate
core/UI/hardware adaptations and other key parts of the proposal, and
it can be looked at. We've chosen the approach of minimal change
because it means we have a working system with less effort.

BR,

Robin
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Robin Burchell
robin+me...@viroteck.net wrote:

 OBS is a very useful tool, just not for the purposes you were
 apparently forced to use it for. I've used it for the commit, push
 package, wait for build failure type development cycle as well, and I
 agree, it's far from optimal - but for easily making heavily
 customised distributions, OBS is great.


Robin, why is OBS different and better than the original buildd's we
used for Maemo and/or nowdays open sourced Launchpad ? I was one of
those who felt the whole lot of changes we've been going through to
adopt to Moblin were time consuming and just presented yet another
hurdle to the community that was already experienced in Debian
packaging and the debian build servers.

I think, if we're reconstructing we should perhaps re think the
decisions that were laid upon us by the corporate governance before we
repeat them.

Important note: this is not trolling, I'm sincerely trying to
understand where and how we are going to from now on.

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Carsten Munk
2011/10/4 Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.com:
 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Robin Burchell
 robin+me...@viroteck.net wrote:

 OBS is a very useful tool, just not for the purposes you were
 apparently forced to use it for. I've used it for the commit, push
 package, wait for build failure type development cycle as well, and I
 agree, it's far from optimal - but for easily making heavily
 customised distributions, OBS is great.


 Robin, why is OBS different and better than the original buildd's we
 used for Maemo and/or nowdays open sourced Launchpad ? I was one of
 those who felt the whole lot of changes we've been going through to
 adopt to Moblin were time consuming and just presented yet another
 hurdle to the community that was already experienced in Debian
 packaging and the debian build servers.

 I think, if we're reconstructing we should perhaps re think the
 decisions that were laid upon us by the corporate governance before we
 repeat them.

 Important note: this is not trolling, I'm sincerely trying to
 understand where and how we are going to from now on.

Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but only when
you're doing Debian and Debian only. OBS is different in many
different ways and allows a proper productization environment as well
as growing an organisation organically.

The choice has been made to go for OBS and RPM in Mer - we'll be in a
even longer cycle if we were to revert to Debian based things and it's
not obvious there'll be any benefit - I personally got bitten badly by
basing on Debian/Ubuntu in the first iteration of Mer. We're here now
and we have something that works and expertise in these areas. That's
the direction we're going in.

(I swear, if we are going to have the RPM vs DEB talk, I'll propose we
switch to rot13 encrypted zip files and actually go ahead with it!)

BR
Carsten Munk
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Robin Burchell
robin+me...@viroteck.net wrote:
 it can be looked at. We've chosen the approach of minimal change
 because it means we have a working system with less effort.


I realize this, does this mean that once we find someone to sponsor
the servers we just deploy OBS on it and we are done? (trying ot
understand where this saves effort)

Again - I hope that's okay I'm asking all of this, and this does not
look like being ungrateful for the proposal :-) (With how MeeGo
mailing lists looked the last couple of months, one be better sure
than sorry ;))

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Tuomas Kulve

On 10/04/2011 12:06 PM, Jon Nordby wrote:

Don't go around trying to changing everything if what you're missing is
just Scratchbox.


I also liked the Scratchbox, despite the problems.

For MeeGo stuff I use this (ARM chroot created from the osc local build):

http://tuomas.kulve.fi/blog/2011/07/09/meego-1-2-armv7-chroot-beta/

The usage is similar to Scratchbox, chroot in and run make.

I feel that the OBS is a bit overkill (i.e. slow) for a single component 
developer but maintaining a distro with it seemed convenient. It was 
especially nice to notice that a company's private OBS was able to link 
to the upstream OBS and only build the differencies. The rest (both 
source and binary) came from the upstream automatically.


--
Tuomas
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:
 Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but only when
 you're doing Debian and Debian only. OBS is different in many
 different ways and allows a proper productization environment as well
 as growing an organisation organically.

I see, thanks for enlightening me. We should then look to add the
missing features like Feature Planning (blueprint) and others from
Launchpad, although we could just use the wiki for everything not
build / commit stuff.


 The choice has been made to go for OBS and RPM in Mer - we'll be in a
 even longer cycle if we were to revert to Debian based things and it's
 not obvious there'll be any benefit - I personally got bitten badly by
 basing on Debian/Ubuntu in the first iteration of Mer. We're here now
 and we have something that works and expertise in these areas. That's
 the direction we're going in.

 (I swear, if we are going to have the RPM vs DEB talk, I'll propose we
 switch to rot13 encrypted zip files and actually go ahead with it!)


I've stopped it, I hope Qt Creator will learn to create RPM packages
by when Mer is reading for playing with :-D

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.comwrote:

 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:
  Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but only when
  you're doing Debian and Debian only.


Except it was built by Canonical for Ubuntu and is used by Linaro. But
perhaps those two things are Debian too?


 OBS is different in many
  different ways and allows a proper productization environment as well
  as growing an organisation organically.


What does that even mean?



 I see, thanks for enlightening me.


You're not enlightened, you've just gotten a perspective from one developer
on why they like what they like.


 We should then look to add the
 missing features like Feature Planning (blueprint) and others from
 Launchpad, although we could just use the wiki for everything not
 build / commit stuff.


NB - Not all of Launchpad is open source.


 
  The choice has been made to go for OBS and RPM in Mer - we'll be in a
  even longer cycle if we were to revert to Debian based things and it's
  not obvious there'll be any benefit - I personally got bitten badly by
  basing on Debian/Ubuntu in the first iteration of Mer. We're here now
  and we have something that works and expertise in these areas. That's
  the direction we're going in.
 
  (I swear, if we are going to have the RPM vs DEB talk, I'll propose we
  switch to rot13 encrypted zip files and actually go ahead with it!)


Ignorance is bliss.

Regards,

Jeremiah
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com 
karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com wrote:

 Hello,

 This is just my 0.02 cents. I would think it should be done like this:

 - Take the debian based distro and development environment (that works) as
 a basis. It works. Look at Harmattan and all previous Nokia Maemo devices.


This makes way too much sense to be adopted. :-)

Don't start your own project, join someone else's.
- Dan Frye:

Regards,

Jeremiah
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 1:58 PM, Jeremiah Foster
jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com wrote:
 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.com
 wrote:

 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:
  Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but only when
  you're doing Debian and Debian only.

 Except it was built by Canonical for Ubuntu and is used by Linaro. But
 perhaps those two things are Debian too?


 OBS is different in many
  different ways and allows a proper productization environment as well
  as growing an organisation organically.

 What does that even mean?

I would also like to understand that, perhaps through the use of that
layer on top of OBS which I had forgotten its name? Is there somewhere
documentation to read about this?


 I see, thanks for enlightening me.

 You're not enlightened, you've just gotten a perspective from one developer
 on why they like what they like.

To be frank, I just did not want to make Carsten angry and go with
rot13 encrypted zip files so we actually have to use it ;-)



 We should then look to add the
 missing features like Feature Planning (blueprint) and others from
 Launchpad, although we could just use the wiki for everything not
 build / commit stuff.

 NB - Not all of Launchpad is open source.

I stand corrected.


 
  The choice has been made to go for OBS and RPM in Mer - we'll be in a
  even longer cycle if we were to revert to Debian based things and it's
  not obvious there'll be any benefit - I personally got bitten badly by
  basing on Debian/Ubuntu in the first iteration of Mer. We're here now
  and we have something that works and expertise in these areas. That's
  the direction we're going in.
 
  (I swear, if we are going to have the RPM vs DEB talk, I'll propose we
  switch to rot13 encrypted zip files and actually go ahead with it!)

 Ignorance is bliss.


Well, deb lovers could always try and have their own deb'd meego as
Robin noted. But if Qt Creator does take care of all the packaging for
RPM and the upload to OBS, then I should not care about the underlying
packaging system.

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Tom Swindell
On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 13:58 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.com
 wrote:
 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk
 cars...@maemo.org wrote:
  Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but
 only when
  you're doing Debian and Debian only. 
 
 
 Except it was built by Canonical for Ubuntu and is used by Linaro. But
 perhaps those two things are Debian too? 
  
 OBS is different in many
  different ways and allows a proper productization
 environment as well
  as growing an organisation organically.
 
 
 
 What does that even mean?

OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages locally and
on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be polluted by
whatever packages a developer has installed and makes dependency
tracking a bit harder IMO.

I think what Carsten means by growing an organisation organically is
that OBS allows multiple users to create their own repositories, it
allows us to separate different projects into different repositories for
staging or logical separation and it's easy and intuitive to do all of
this from the web interface and to tools provided.

OBS may not offer anything more or less than Launchpad or buildd, but it
is completely open source and it targets many more distributions than
Launchpad or buildd do.

  
 
 
 I see, thanks for enlightening me. 
 
 
 You're not enlightened, you've just gotten a perspective from one
 developer on why they like what they like.
  
 We should then look to add the
 missing features like Feature Planning (blueprint) and others
 from
 Launchpad, although we could just use the wiki for everything
 not
 build / commit stuff.
 
 
 NB - Not all of Launchpad is open source.
 
 
  The choice has been made to go for OBS and RPM in Mer -
 we'll be in a
  even longer cycle if we were to revert to Debian based
 things and it's
  not obvious there'll be any benefit - I personally got
 bitten badly by
  basing on Debian/Ubuntu in the first iteration of Mer. We're
 here now
  and we have something that works and expertise in these
 areas. That's
  the direction we're going in.
 
  (I swear, if we are going to have the RPM vs DEB talk, I'll
 propose we
  switch to rot13 encrypted zip files and actually go ahead
 with it!)
 
 
 
 Ignorance is bliss.
 
 
 Regards,
 
 
 Jeremiah 
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Tom Swindell t.swind...@rubyx.co.uk wrote:

 On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 13:58 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Sivan Greenberg si...@omniqueue.com
  wrote:
  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk
  cars...@maemo.org wrote:
   Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very useful but
  only when
   you're doing Debian and Debian only.
 
 
  Except it was built by Canonical for Ubuntu and is used by Linaro. But
  perhaps those two things are Debian too?
 
  OBS is different in many
   different ways and allows a proper productization
  environment as well
   as growing an organisation organically.
 
 
 
  What does that even mean?

 OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages locally and
 on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be polluted by
 whatever packages a developer has installed and makes dependency
 tracking a bit harder IMO.


I agree that working in a dirty chroot is problematic. That is why there is
pbuilder and cowdancer.



 I think what Carsten means by growing an organisation organically is
 that OBS allows multiple users to create their own repositories, it
 allows us to separate different projects into different repositories for
 staging or logical separation and it's easy and intuitive to do all of
 this from the web interface and to tools provided.


This is likely what he's referring to. But as someone who is concerned with
integration, this is bordering on a misfeature. What is happening is that
each repository is a separate Linux distro. This makes integration a
complete nightmare and unlikely to occur. Look a the ABI break that occurred
in MeeGo for ARM. That effectively killed any release of that distro.

Just because you can build your own Linux distro doesn't mean you should.


 OBS may not offer anything more or less than Launchpad or buildd, but it
 is completely open source and it targets many more distributions than
 Launchpad or buildd do.


And more package formats, processor virtualization, per-package compiler
flags, and a mock version control tool, etc. But all these things can mean
that your package will not work with other distros and then we are back to
everyone doing their own thing. How does that help move free software
forward? It doesn't, it only encourages the silo effect and Not Invented
Here.

Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux distros
(before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays fragmentation
is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.

I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with retracing
your path back to the main highway.

Regards,

Jeremiah
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Carsten Munk
2011/10/4 karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com:
 Hello,
 I think one of the things with the MeeGo was that it was a downgrade in
 development environment, CI systems and everything from our
 Maemo.
So, for good measure - those CI systems were never open source or
published outside the Maemo organisation. And couldn't be reused
properly for non-Debian based targets. New ones had to be developed.

 All that has been made for debian based distro and the change to the
 rpm does not make slightest sense. The debian based distro and everything
 that surrounds it has much longer history on this context and it is that
 simple. I joined the team that became later Maemo already in 2004. Back then
 scratchbox was new invention, but still today it has no replacement which
 would be better or equal. Before scratchbox we were compiling with ext hard
 drive connected to Nokia 770 proto (and ran the gcc on the arm). After
 scratchbox came, there was a great convenience improvement. Killing
 scratchbox without a replacement (OBS is not a replacement!) is not very
 good choice.

I will agree that there was a gap in development tools. It's easy to
start pointing fingers at where things went wrong and who was
responsible, but I won't. But the sad truth is that even with Maemo,
the full stack was uncompliable without internal access to Maemo
sources - it wasn't something to build a platform from.

As Kulve suggested, it is actually pretty easy to get a scratchbox
like chroot. One of the mistakes that MeeGo had was that, well, it
required Atom processors/SSSE3 to run simple development emulation
environments - which honestly, in big organisations was difficult to
find. This meant that practically, people couldn't run MeeGo in a VM
and develop straight on their typical development machine.

I stated my thoughts on build vs emulation in an old blog post of
mine: 
http://mer-project.blogspot.com/2009/08/debconf-thoughts-part-two-on-cross.html

In our original Mer project, it was possible to simply install the
entire development chain within a Mer for X86 virtual machine - and
develop directly on your PC for a system that works exactly as on
device and well-performing too. That was the piece of the puzzle that
didn't work with MeeGo.

Deep down, the packaging format doesn't matter. What matters is what
perspective things has been built with - a traditional desktop will
try to enable the kitchen sink of features. A mobile one enables those
it needs. Think of the Maemo process as cleaning out weeds in the
garden to make it fit in mobile settings.  Moblin and MeeGo was built
from scratch up for a specific mobile purpose - and even then they
managed to get crazy dependancies into the system.  And that's why I
like Moblin/MeeGo and their way of doing things - it's a lean and mean
Qt core.

 This is just my 0.02 cents. I would think it should be done like this:
 - Take the debian based distro and development environment (that works) as a
 basis. It works. Look at Harmattan and all previous Nokia Maemo devices.
I know it works and I also know how much difficulty (and years upon
years of manhours) people have gone through to mangle and modify the
Debian stack to the point it is in those mobile OS'es. I've even tried
to build things myself and realized pretty quickly why Maemo is
patched in head and tail where it is. But the fact is - that system
does not exist in open source. When inside a product organisation you
tend to loose perspective of what's open and what's not.

 - Number 2 key to the success is a blazingly superb UI. snip I think QML is 
 a key to developing
 any UI concept fast whatever the Mer wants to be.
 - Number 3: Thou shalt not restrict it to one single technology. I think
 restricting to HTML5 only or QML only would be a bad idea. Instead a support
 of choices which work for different purposes is a key to success. Things
 which do not need to be replaced should not be replaced, they can be
 substituted, but not replaced.
And that's why it's a Core that seeks to perform well with
HTML5/QML/JS - anyone can do brilliant things with it. Want to run a
great UI on top? Be my guest!

BR
Carsten Munk


 On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 9:01 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:

 Hi all,

 MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
 Maemo, Moblin?

 We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
 Moblin - and now Tizen.

 A lot of proposals have been put forward:
 * Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
 * Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian,
 openSUSE, etc)
 * Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

 The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
 interested communities to work with Tizen.

 Our solution is the Mer Project:

 How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration
 community for devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then
 contributions will 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Tom Swindell
  Other reasons for keeping OBS include trying to change as little as
possible from what MeeGo has done. So those vendors that are possibly
already accustomed and are currently using MeeGo facilities, like OBS.
Can easily migrate to Mer. There really isn't much point in debating
this, Carsten has made his decision ...

Thanks, Tom.

On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 14:19 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
 On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Tom Swindell t.swind...@rubyx.co.uk
 wrote:
 On Tue, 2011-10-04 at 13:58 +0200, Jeremiah Foster wrote:
  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Sivan Greenberg
 si...@omniqueue.com
  wrote:
  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Carsten Munk
  cars...@maemo.org wrote:
   Long story short: buildd and launchpad is very
 useful but
  only when
   you're doing Debian and Debian only.
 
 
  Except it was built by Canonical for Ubuntu and is used by
 Linaro. But
  perhaps those two things are Debian too?
 
  OBS is different in many
   different ways and allows a proper productization
  environment as well
   as growing an organisation organically.
 
 
 
  What does that even mean?
 
 
 OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages
 locally and
 on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be
 polluted by
 whatever packages a developer has installed and makes
 dependency
 tracking a bit harder IMO.
 
 
 I agree that working in a dirty chroot is problematic. That is why
 there is pbuilder and cowdancer.
  
 
 I think what Carsten means by growing an organisation
 organically is
 that OBS allows multiple users to create their own
 repositories, it
 allows us to separate different projects into different
 repositories for
 staging or logical separation and it's easy and intuitive to
 do all of
 this from the web interface and to tools provided.
 
 
 This is likely what he's referring to. But as someone who is concerned
 with integration, this is bordering on a misfeature. What is happening
 is that each repository is a separate Linux distro. This makes
 integration a complete nightmare and unlikely to occur. Look a the ABI
 break that occurred in MeeGo for ARM. That effectively killed any
 release of that distro. 
 
 
 Just because you can build your own Linux distro doesn't mean you
 should. 
 
 OBS may not offer anything more or less than Launchpad or
 buildd, but it
 is completely open source and it targets many more
 distributions than
 Launchpad or buildd do.
 
 
 And more package formats, processor virtualization, per-package
 compiler flags, and a mock version control tool, etc. But all these
 things can mean that your package will not work with other distros and
 then we are back to everyone doing their own thing. How does that help
 move free software forward? It doesn't, it only encourages the silo
 effect and Not Invented Here. 
 
 
 Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux
 distros (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays
 fragmentation is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an
 OBS login. 
 
 
 I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with
 retracing your path back to the main highway.
 
 
 Regards,
 
 
 Jeremiah
 
 
 
 


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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Mika Laitio

OBS is a very useful tool, just not for the purposes you were
apparently forced to use it for. I've used it for the commit, push
package, wait for build failure type development cycle as well, and I
agree, it's far from optimal - but for easily making heavily


There are couple of ways to speed up the development also when working 
in the OBS environment, especially when really trying to solve real 
development problems. Here couple of tips.


1) offline option -o when doing osc build will speed up things a 
little when trying to do a multiple local builds in a row, as then the

obs does not try to get the latest dependency list from the server.
osc build -o armv8el as an example...

2)When doing a development, you can first create the chroot env with
  osc build command and then after the first build have started switch
  to chroot environment

a) osc co Project:DE:Trunk/ohm
b) cd Project:DE:Trunk/ohm
c) osc build armv8el
   ... wait the build to complete or fail and then switch to chroot env
d) cd /var/tmp/osc-build-root/
e) sudo su
f) chroot .
g) cd home/abuild/rpmbuild/BUILD/ohm-1.1.14
h) run commands like make/make install on chrooted bash shell
i) edit the files by using your favourite editor from another shell
   from dir /var/tmp/osc-build-root/home/abuild/rpmbuild/BUILD/ohm-1.1.14

3) you can have multiple chrooted environments by editing build-root
   variable from the ~/.oscrc file. I for example prefer of having 
something like: build-root = /obs/buildroots/%(repo)s-%(arch)s


4) You can force that osc build command will always put certain 
packages to chroot env in addition of the direct dependencies of certain 
app by listing these extra packages is ~/.oscrc file.

For example: extra-pkgs = gdb strace

What I am also missing would be an easy way to configure the QT creator 
easily to use the qt, qml and gcc from the chrooted env.

(So I could just do the qml editing with the qt-creator by using those
components that happens to be installed in the chroot env that the osc 
build command has created.) So if somebody knows ways to do that, I 
would be very interested.


Mika

customised distributions, OBS is great.


e.g. seeing our duicontrolpanel on MeeGo-MeeGo installation instead of
Harmattan is a whole different experience than seeing it on Harmattan
device),


snip


But good news, there is a easy technology to make a superb UI framework 
rapidly, QML.
It needs some work,  needs to be consistent UI concept, excellent graphics 
(which have a meaning,


The technology is, at the end of the day, not that important (though I
agree that QML makes life a lot easier) - at the end of the day, you
can have the best written UI in the world, and it will still look like
complete and utter crap without decent theming.

Hopefully we can poke some of the awesome graphical people around like
wazd to give us a hand with some of this.


- Many of the lower layers have been already open sourced by companies and
it is just about utilizing them and doing the top of the cake right. There
are some missing pieces, but filling the gaps should not be impossible.


One of the missing gaps, at least on Handset CE, is the settings
application. As you point out, it is not visually pleasing, it has
flickering text (!! Wifi before changing to the actual text), and
other issues which make it a bit pailful to use.

Given your experience with it, would you like to dedicate some time to
making it more usable, perhaps even doing some thinking on how to
approach it from the QML world?

BR,

Robin
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Sivan Greenberg
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Jeremiah Foster
jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com wrote:

 I think what Carsten means by growing an organisation organically is
 that OBS allows multiple users to create their own repositories, it
 allows us to separate different projects into different repositories for
 staging or logical separation and it's easy and intuitive to do all of
 this from the web interface and to tools provided.

 This is likely what he's referring to. But as someone who is concerned with
 integration, this is bordering on a misfeature. What is happening is that
 each repository is a separate Linux distro. This makes integration a
 complete nightmare and unlikely to occur. Look a the ABI break that occurred
 in MeeGo for ARM. That effectively killed any release of that distro.
 Just because you can build your own Linux distro doesn't mean you should.


Also, does not Launchpad support PPA at this point, as well as on the
fly test builds out of version control? I know Linaro people are using
it and are quite happy about it or perhaps I'm misinformed ? It might
be ahead of time to be concerned by this, but the concern Quim Gill
expressed about the ability of the community to fund the
infrastructure might be realized if Mer is to be adopted on a large
scale...

My personal experience with Launchpad is that the sysadmin personnel
is *VERY* responsive and cater for rapid and fruitful distro work.
Again, those concerns are only for when Mer is in massive adoption
which is where we want to reach anyway? How do we pitch prospective
sponsors when they ask us about Harmattan and speak about Debian in
the mobile field, I think it has some success compared to others.
Linaro seems to be doing well and they so far manage to gather vendors
interested.


Again, no trolling, just asking questions :)

-Sivan
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Samuel Stirtzel
Hi,
maybe I'm wrong but the Scratchbox mailing lists looks pretty dead
right now (see [1]). Is there any community alive behind it, or should
the new MeeGo project reanimate Scratchbox if it would be used?

2011/10/4 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com:
 OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages locally and
 on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be polluted by
 whatever packages a developer has installed and makes dependency
 tracking a bit harder IMO.

 I agree that working in a dirty chroot is problematic. That is why there is
 pbuilder and cowdancer.


Wouldn't it be better to use a decentral build system? Can a mobile
segment distro like MeeGo be really compared with a desktop segment
distro like e.g. embedded Ubuntu? (This is not relative to your
message but a general rhetorical question.)
Well I didn't use embedded Debian as example because Emdebian mailing
lilsts seem to be pretty dead [2].


 Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux distros
 (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays fragmentation
 is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.
 I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with retracing
 your path back to the main highway.

There seems to be much standardization work going on in the Yocto
Project / OpenEmbedded Core (see [3], also Carsten already mentioned
the Yocto Project in context of governance), anyone evaluated it?
The Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded was discussed before in the IVI
mailing list (see [4]), but it lacks any technical explanations and
arguments why it cannot be used / or get adapted, also OpenEmbedded
progressed into the new OpenEmbedded Core Project (the next release is
just one step away).
On a technical point of view it is possible to port over to Yocto
Project, and it would make sence to concentrate the development of
embedded linux distributions to unify them into a single development
base instead of fragmenting the communities.

Well I just stated my opinion here.

[1] http://lists.scratchbox.org/pipermail/scratchbox-devel/
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2011/09/threads.html
[3] http://www.yoctoproject.org/projects/openembedded-core
[4] http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-ivi/2011-February/000198.html

 Regards,
 Jeremiah


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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Arnaud Delcasse
2011/10/4 Samuel Stirtzel s.stirt...@googlemail.com:
 Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux distros
 (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays fragmentation
 is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.
 I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with retracing
 your path back to the main highway.

 There seems to be much standardization work going on in the Yocto
 Project / OpenEmbedded Core (see [3], also Carsten already mentioned
 the Yocto Project in context of governance), anyone evaluated it?
 The Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded was discussed before in the IVI
 mailing list (see [4]), but it lacks any technical explanations and
 arguments why it cannot be used / or get adapted, also OpenEmbedded
 progressed into the new OpenEmbedded Core Project (the next release is
 just one step away).
 On a technical point of view it is possible to port over to Yocto
 Project, and it would make sence to concentrate the development of
 embedded linux distributions to unify them into a single development
 base instead of fragmenting the communities.

Well, I think that would make sense if the Mer project didn't want to
stay close to Tizen if possible, integrating Tizen features. Mer as a
standalone project can take these directions unilaterally, where it
would be more difficult to make it happen in another project. That
doesn't mean that efforts on some parts cannot be shared (the same way
like with Tizen), but IMO, the direction, philosophy and basis of Mer
as I undestand it justify that it stays independent.

Regards,

Arnaud
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Samuel Stirtzel
s.stirt...@googlemail.comwrote:

[snip]


 2011/10/4 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com:
  OBS is built with packaging in mind, so it builds packages locally and
  on servers in a sanitized environment. Scratchbox may be polluted by
  whatever packages a developer has installed and makes dependency
  tracking a bit harder IMO.
 
  I agree that working in a dirty chroot is problematic. That is why there
 is
  pbuilder and cowdancer.
 

 Wouldn't it be better to use a decentral build system?


Sometimes embedded developers only have the target and their laptop. So
often having your complete toolchain on your laptop while you work on site
at a customer for example can be part of a developer's work flow. This means
a decentralized system can be a necessity. But you have to make sure you
send back your patches.


 Can a mobile
 segment distro like MeeGo be really compared with a desktop segment
 distro like e.g. embedded Ubuntu? (This is not relative to your
 message but a general rhetorical question.)


I don't understand what you mean by segment here. And I also don't
understand what you're referring to with embedded Ubuntu.


 Well I didn't use embedded Debian as example because Emdebian mailing
 lilsts seem to be pretty dead [2].


Embedian is very much alive. More here:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2011/12/#emdebian


  Before it was just big companies that could create their own Linux
 distros
  (before that everyone had their bespoke UNIX distro) nowadays
 fragmentation
  is brought to you by every Tom, Dick and Harry with an OBS login.
  I've been down the fragmentation road before. It always ends with
 retracing
  your path back to the main highway.

 There seems to be much standardization work going on in the Yocto
 Project / OpenEmbedded Core (see [3], also Carsten already mentioned
 the Yocto Project in context of governance), anyone evaluated it?


Yocto is very interesting indeed, as is OpenEmbedded, though the claim is
that Yocto is open embedded done right. But for the purposes of a distro I
don't think Yocto is the silver bullet people are looking for. Firstly, it
seems focused on Intel Atom BSPs and overall seems designed to help in board
bring-up. Yes you can create a complete distro, but like a misused OBS
repository, creating your own complete distro is not a good idea. Unless of
course yours is THE ONE.


 The Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded was discussed before in the IVI
 mailing list (see [4]), but it lacks any technical explanations and
 arguments why it cannot be used / or get adapted, also OpenEmbedded
 progressed into the new OpenEmbedded Core Project (the next release is
 just one step away).


https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/FAQ

OpenEmbedded is widely used in commercial embedded systems. Those systems
tend to not be open source systems and end up costing lots of money.

Regards,

Jeremiah


 On a technical point of view it is possible to port over to Yocto
 Project, and it would make sence to concentrate the development of
 embedded linux distributions to unify them into a single development
 base instead of fragmenting the communities.

 Well I just stated my opinion here.

 [1] http://lists.scratchbox.org/pipermail/scratchbox-devel/
 [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2011/09/threads.html
 [3] http://www.yoctoproject.org/projects/openembedded-core
 [4] http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/meego-ivi/2011-February/000198.html

  Regards,
  Jeremiah
 
 
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 Regards
 Samuel
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-04 Thread Jeremiah Foster
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:48 PM, Stefan Werden stefan.wer...@open-slx.dewrote:

 Hi,

 switching to debian would mean making a complete new projekt.


Nope, it would merely mean adding software to the Debian project, it
wouldn't require a new project at all. Debian would host the infrastructure
(it has its own IRC, build farm, hosting, project software, email lists,
funding, non-profit status, social contract, shell accounts, git server, svn
server, well, you get the picture.) You could turn Mer into a Debian blend
for example: http://wiki.debian.org/DebianPureBlends or you could become a
Debian derivative: http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census

Debian derivatives currently dominate the Linux landscape. Of the top four
distros on Distro Watch, three of them are deb based. This means you get a
huge development ecosystem when you use debs, as well as a lot of users.


 I would prefer to
 just continure the current running stack.

It saves time and people know how to handle it.


*sigh*



 regards,

 Stefan


 Jeremiah Foster jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com hat am 4. Oktober 2011 um
 14:03
 geschrieben:

  On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 10:53 AM, karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com 
  karoliina.t.salmi...@gmail.com wrote:
 
   Hello,
  
   This is just my 0.02 cents. I would think it should be done like this:
  
   - Take the debian based distro and development environment (that works)
 as
   a basis. It works. Look at Harmattan and all previous Nokia Maemo
 devices.
  
 
  This makes way too much sense to be adopted. :-)
 
  Don't start your own project, join someone else's.
  - Dan Frye:
 
  Regards,
 
  Jeremiah
 --
 Dr. Stefan Werden
 Managing Director
 open-slx gmbh, HRB 25876,
 Einsteinring 7, 90453 Nürnberg, Germany




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Ekelundsgatan 4, 6tr, SE-411 18 Gothenburg, Sweden
Mobile: +46 (0)730 93 0506
E-Mail: jeremiah.fos...@pelagicore.com
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=== NOTE ===
The information contained in this E-mail message is
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Timo Härkönen
2011/10/3 Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org

 Hi all,

 Our solution is the Mer Project:


Excellent! count me in.

A few questions about the project's communication channels? Do we use these
MeeGo mailing list, the meego-* IRC channels or are we moving somewhere?
(IMO moving to mer-specific channels would make sense)

-Timo
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Carsten Munk
2011/10/3 Timo Härkönen timop.harko...@gmail.com:


 2011/10/3 Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org

 Hi all,

 Our solution is the Mer Project:


 Excellent! count me in.

 A few questions about the project's communication channels? Do we use these
 MeeGo mailing list, the meego-* IRC channels or are we moving somewhere?
 (IMO moving to mer-specific channels would make sense)

I think for now, we use mer specific channels. Ideally we'd like to
stay within MeeGo community, but for reasons such as trademark usage
and uncertain future, we'd like to earn ability to use MeeGo as a name
through actual effort and merit.

Also, I seem to have learnt that cross posting is bad, seems like I
posted to meego-commits@ as well instead of meego-community.

BR
Carsten Munk
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread martin brook
Carsten Hi,

Your aims are why I was draw to MeeGo in the first place and its good to see
you aiming even higher.

'We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the
hacker community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new
vendor device that a single hacker could do it for their device.'

That's me so count me in.

vgrade

PS thanks for adding the Pi video link

On Mon, Oct 3, 2011 at 7:01 AM, Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org wrote:

 Hi all,

 MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
 Maemo, Moblin?

 We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
 Moblin - and now Tizen.

 A lot of proposals have been put forward:
 * Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
 * Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian,
 openSUSE, etc)
 * Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

 The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
 interested communities to work with Tizen.

 Our solution is the Mer Project:

 How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration
 community for devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then
 contributions will end up the same place, no matter if it's Tizen,
 Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.

 Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called
 Mer, short for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open
 mobile platform through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a
 open platform. We were big on open governance, open development and
 open source.

 For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios
 of change in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open,
 it's time to talk about what we as a community can make happen next.
 To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or anti-Intel
 project, but a direction we can and will go in - we strongly want to
 collaborate with Tizen and Intel.

 We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the
 hacker community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new
 vendor device that a single hacker could do it for their device.

 We decided to approach the problems and potential scenarios of change
 in MeeGo in the light of the reallocation of resources caused by what
 is now known as the Tizen work. There have not been any Trunk/1.3
 releases since August and Tablet UX has totally stalled. What really
 works (and works quite well) is the Core. It's time to take the pieces
 and use them for reconstruction.

 We have some clear goals:

 * To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
 * That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not
 end-users.
 * To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and
 tools: make life easy for them
 * To have a device oriented architecture
 * To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
 * To innovate in the mobile OS space

 Now we'd like to talk a bit about what specific initiatives we propose to
 take:

 0) Becoming MeeGo 2.0

 Our work has the intended goal of being MeeGo 2.0 - and we hope that
 the Linux Foundation will see our work as a worthy succesor within the
 MeeGo spirit. We'd like to provide ability to be Tizen compliant, i.e.
 supporting HTML5/WAC and the application story there and feed back to
 that ecosystem.

 1) Modularity. A set of architectural components for making devices.

 Rather than dictate the architecture we will support collaboration and
 the flexibility to easily access off-the-shelf components for device
 projects. Component independence permits focused feature and delivery
 management too.

 Initially the project will be developing a Core for basing products on
 and will split UX and hardware adaptations out into seperate projects
 within the community surrounding the Core.

 2) Working towards an ultra-portable Linux + HTML5/QML/JS Core for
 building products with.

 We have already taken MeeGo and cut it into a set of 302 source
 packages that can boot into a Qt UI along with standard MeeGo stack
 pieces. This work can be seen already at [2] and we've made our first
 release and have had it booting on devices already[6].

 To ease maintenance, we would like to encourage people to participate
 in the Core work of the Tizen project, utilizing their work where we
 can in Mer: why do the same work twice? Even if Tizen turns out to be
 dramatically different, the maintenance load of 302 source packages -
 much of it typical Linux software, is significantly lower than that of
 the 1400 packages found in MeeGo today.

 Using another lesson learned from MeeGo, we also want to port this
 work to everywhere, ARMv6/7 - hardfp, softfp, i486, Atom, MIPS, etc -
 allowing much more freedom for porting to new devices.

 3) Change governance towards a more technically oriented one, similar
 to the Yocto Project

 We'd like to propose a revamp of governance based upon the Yocto
 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Randall Arnold


From: Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org
To: meego-dev meego-dev@meego.com; meego-comm...@meego.com
Sent: Monday, October 3, 2011 1:01 AM
Subject: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for 
MeeGo

Hi all,

MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
Maemo, Moblin?

We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
Moblin - and now Tizen.

...

Our solution is the Mer Project:



Count me in, Carsten, David and Robin, even if I get involved with other 
projects.

Randall (Randy) Arnold
http://texrat.net
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Thomas.Rucker
Hi,

-Original Message-
From: Randall Arnold

From: Carsten Munk cars...@maemo.org
To: meego-dev meego-dev@meego.com; meego-comm...@meego.com
Sent: Monday, October 3, 2011 1:01 AM
Subject: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and
direction for MeeGo

Hi all,

MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
Maemo, Moblin?

We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
Moblin - and now Tizen.

...

Our solution is the Mer Project:



Count me in, Carsten, David and Robin, even if I get involved with other
projects.

+1 from me

I didn't manage for openMind, but I promise to look into Mer on Archos 
gen6/7/8/9, BeagleBoard, PandaBoard and SnowBall as soon as I recover from this 
head cold and find some spare time. (help welcome!)

Cheers

Thomas
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread ext-iekku.pylkka
Hi,

Sounds great! Count me in.

--
Iekku

-Original Message-
From: meego-dev-boun...@meego.com [mailto:meego-dev-
boun...@meego.com] On Behalf Of ext Carsten Munk
Sent: 03 October, 2011 09:01
To: meego-dev; meego-comm...@meego.com
Subject: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction
for MeeGo

Hi all,

MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? - Maemo,
Moblin?

We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo,
Maemo, Moblin - and now Tizen.

A lot of proposals have been put forward:
* Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
* Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian, openSUSE,
etc)
* Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other interested
communities to work with Tizen.

Our solution is the Mer Project:

How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration community for
devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then contributions will end up
the same place, no matter if it's Tizen, Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.

Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called Mer,
short for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open mobile
platform through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a open platform.
We were big on open governance, open development and open source.

For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios of
change in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open, it's time
to talk about what we as a community can make happen next.
To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or anti-Intel project, 
but a
direction we can and will go in - we strongly want to collaborate with Tizen 
and
Intel.

We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the hacker
community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new vendor device
that a single hacker could do it for their device.

We decided to approach the problems and potential scenarios of change in
MeeGo in the light of the reallocation of resources caused by what is now
known as the Tizen work. There have not been any Trunk/1.3 releases since
August and Tablet UX has totally stalled. What really works (and works quite
well) is the Core. It's time to take the pieces and use them for 
reconstruction.

We have some clear goals:

* To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
* That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
* To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and
tools: make life easy for them
* To have a device oriented architecture
* To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
* To innovate in the mobile OS space

Now we'd like to talk a bit about what specific initiatives we propose to take:

0) Becoming MeeGo 2.0

Our work has the intended goal of being MeeGo 2.0 - and we hope that the
Linux Foundation will see our work as a worthy succesor within the MeeGo
spirit. We'd like to provide ability to be Tizen compliant, i.e.
supporting HTML5/WAC and the application story there and feed back to that
ecosystem.

1) Modularity. A set of architectural components for making devices.

Rather than dictate the architecture we will support collaboration and the
flexibility to easily access off-the-shelf components for device projects.
Component independence permits focused feature and delivery
management too.

Initially the project will be developing a Core for basing products on and will
split UX and hardware adaptations out into seperate projects within the
community surrounding the Core.

2) Working towards an ultra-portable Linux + HTML5/QML/JS Core for building
products with.

We have already taken MeeGo and cut it into a set of 302 source packages
that can boot into a Qt UI along with standard MeeGo stack pieces. This work
can be seen already at [2] and we've made our first release and have had it
booting on devices already[6].

To ease maintenance, we would like to encourage people to participate in the
Core work of the Tizen project, utilizing their work where we can in Mer: why
do the same work twice? Even if Tizen turns out to be dramatically different,
the maintenance load of 302 source packages - much of it typical Linux
software, is significantly lower than that of the 1400 packages found in MeeGo
today.

Using another lesson learned from MeeGo, we also want to port this work to
everywhere, ARMv6/7 - hardfp, softfp, i486, Atom, MIPS, etc - allowing much
more freedom for porting to new devices.

3) Change governance towards a more technically oriented one, similar to the
Yocto Project

We'd like to propose a revamp of governance based upon the Yocto Project
governance - which is much more geared towards open technical work -
encouraging collaboration and discussion. You can look at a description of this
at [3].

4) Work towards better vendor relations and software to 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Alberto Mardegan

Il 10/03/2011 09:01 AM, Carsten Munk ha scritto:

The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
interested communities to work with Tizen.

Our solution is the Mer Project:

[...]

That's fantastic! I can't make any promises, as free time is an 
obsolete concept for me, but I'll support the project as much as I can.


Thanks guys for driving this!

Ciao,
  Alberto
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Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread nic...@nicoladefilippo.it
Hi,
+1 Nicola 
Da: meego-dev-boun...@meego.com
A: meego-dev meego-dev@meego.com, meego-comm...@meego.com
Cc: 
Data: Mon, 3 Oct 2011 08:01:17 +0200
Oggetto: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for 
MeeGo

 Hi all,
 
 MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
 Maemo, Moblin?
 
 We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
 Moblin - and now Tizen.
 
 A lot of proposals have been put forward:
 * Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
 * Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian,
 openSUSE, etc)
 * Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation
 
 The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
 interested communities to work with Tizen.
 
 Our solution is the Mer Project:
 
 How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration
 community for devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then
 contributions will end up the same place, no matter if it's Tizen,
 Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.
 
 Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called
 Mer, short for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open
 mobile platform through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a
 open platform. We were big on open governance, open development and
 open source.
 
 For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios
 of change in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open,
 it's time to talk about what we as a community can make happen next.
 To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or anti-Intel
 project, but a direction we can and will go in - we strongly want to
 collaborate with Tizen and Intel.
 
 We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the
 hacker community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new
 vendor device that a single hacker could do it for their device.
 
 We decided to approach the problems and potential scenarios of change
 in MeeGo in the light of the reallocation of resources caused by what
 is now known as the Tizen work. There have not been any Trunk/1.3
 releases since August and Tablet UX has totally stalled. What really
 works (and works quite well) is the Core. It's time to take the pieces
 and use them for reconstruction.
 
 We have some clear goals:
 
 * To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
 * That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
 * To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and
 tools: make life easy for them
 * To have a device oriented architecture
 * To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
 * To innovate in the mobile OS space
 
 Now we'd like to talk a bit about what specific initiatives we propose to 
 take:
 
 0) Becoming MeeGo 2.0
 
 Our work has the intended goal of being MeeGo 2.0 - and we hope that
 the Linux Foundation will see our work as a worthy succesor within the
 MeeGo spirit. We'd like to provide ability to be Tizen compliant, i.e.
 supporting HTML5/WAC and the application story there and feed back to
 that ecosystem.
 
 1) Modularity. A set of architectural components for making devices.
 
 Rather than dictate the architecture we will support collaboration and
 the flexibility to easily access off-the-shelf components for device
 projects. Component independence permits focused feature and delivery
 management too.
 
 Initially the project will be developing a Core for basing products on
 and will split UX and hardware adaptations out into seperate projects
 within the community surrounding the Core.
 
 2) Working towards an ultra-portable Linux + HTML5/QML/JS Core for
 building products with.
 
 We have already taken MeeGo and cut it into a set of 302 source
 packages that can boot into a Qt UI along with standard MeeGo stack
 pieces. This work can be seen already at [2] and we've made our first
 release and have had it booting on devices already[6].
 
 To ease maintenance, we would like to encourage people to participate
 in the Core work of the Tizen project, utilizing their work where we
 can in Mer: why do the same work twice? Even if Tizen turns out to be
 dramatically different, the maintenance load of 302 source packages -
 much of it typical Linux software, is significantly lower than that of
 the 1400 packages found in MeeGo today.
 
 Using another lesson learned from MeeGo, we also want to port this
 work to everywhere, ARMv6/7 - hardfp, softfp, i486, Atom, MIPS, etc -
 allowing much more freedom for porting to new devices.
 
 3) Change governance towards a more technically oriented one, similar
 to the Yocto Project
 
 We'd like to propose a revamp of governance based upon the Yocto
 Project governance - which is much more geared towards open technical
 work - encouraging collaboration and discussion. You can look at a
 description of this at [3].
 
 4) Work towards better vendor 

Re: [MeeGo-dev] MeeGo Reconstructed - a plan of action and direction for MeeGo

2011-10-03 Thread Si Howard
I'm for that! Wasn't the Mer project part of the Maemo 5.0 porting to 
the Nokia N8X0 platform?


On 03/10/2011 07:01, Carsten Munk wrote:

Hi all,

MeeGo is dead ... long live Tizen !! - Haven't we heard that before? -
Maemo, Moblin?

We need a community that transcends the mere branding of MeeGo, Maemo,
Moblin - and now Tizen.

A lot of proposals have been put forward:
* Move to Tizen and trust that They'll get it right this time
* Merge or join some existing projects (like the Qt Project, Debian,
openSUSE, etc)
* Keep MeeGo alive by approaching the Linux Foundation

The goal is to find a truly sustainable way for MeeGo and other
interested communities to work with Tizen.

Our solution is the Mer Project:

How does the concept of a truly open and inclusive integration
community for devices sound? After all if upstream is king - then
contributions will end up the same place, no matter if it's Tizen,
Maemo, MeeGo or openSUSE.

Some history - many of us in MeeGo originated from a project called
Mer, short for Maemo Reconstructed - where we approached doing a open
mobile platform through reconstruction of the Maemo platform into a
open platform. We were big on open governance, open development and
open source.

For a few months a group of us have been working on various scenarios
of change in MeeGo [1] and now that the Tizen news is out in the open,
it's time to talk about what we as a community can make happen next.
To make it clear: this is not in any way an anti-Tizen or anti-Intel
project, but a direction we can and will go in - we strongly want to
collaborate with Tizen and Intel.

We will continue to welcome contribution and participation from the
hacker community - in fact we aim to make it so easy to port to a new
vendor device that a single hacker could do it for their device.

We decided to approach the problems and potential scenarios of change
in MeeGo in the light of the reallocation of resources caused by what
is now known as the Tizen work. There have not been any Trunk/1.3
releases since August and Tablet UX has totally stalled. What really
works (and works quite well) is the Core. It's time to take the pieces
and use them for reconstruction.

We have some clear goals:

* To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
* That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
* To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and
tools: make life easy for them
* To have a device oriented architecture
* To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
* To innovate in the mobile OS space

Now we'd like to talk a bit about what specific initiatives we propose to take:

0) Becoming MeeGo 2.0

Our work has the intended goal of being MeeGo 2.0 - and we hope that
the Linux Foundation will see our work as a worthy succesor within the
MeeGo spirit. We'd like to provide ability to be Tizen compliant, i.e.
supporting HTML5/WAC and the application story there and feed back to
that ecosystem.

1) Modularity. A set of architectural components for making devices.

Rather than dictate the architecture we will support collaboration and
the flexibility to easily access off-the-shelf components for device
projects. Component independence permits focused feature and delivery
management too.

Initially the project will be developing a Core for basing products on
and will split UX and hardware adaptations out into seperate projects
within the community surrounding the Core.

2) Working towards an ultra-portable Linux + HTML5/QML/JS Core for
building products with.

We have already taken MeeGo and cut it into a set of 302 source
packages that can boot into a Qt UI along with standard MeeGo stack
pieces. This work can be seen already at [2] and we've made our first
release and have had it booting on devices already[6].

To ease maintenance, we would like to encourage people to participate
in the Core work of the Tizen project, utilizing their work where we
can in Mer: why do the same work twice? Even if Tizen turns out to be
dramatically different, the maintenance load of 302 source packages -
much of it typical Linux software, is significantly lower than that of
the 1400 packages found in MeeGo today.

Using another lesson learned from MeeGo, we also want to port this
work to everywhere, ARMv6/7 - hardfp, softfp, i486, Atom, MIPS, etc -
allowing much more freedom for porting to new devices.

3) Change governance towards a more technically oriented one, similar
to the Yocto Project

We'd like to propose a revamp of governance based upon the Yocto
Project governance - which is much more geared towards open technical
work - encouraging collaboration and discussion. You can look at a
description of this at [3].

4) Work towards better vendor relations and software to support these
as well as easier contribution methods.

As part of our customer oriented goal we're improving delivery
methods from Mer. We are designing simpler and more resilient update