On May 15, 2009, at 9:29, Qole wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 1:44 AM, Jeremiah Foster <[email protected]
> wrote:
To summarize a bit; I think the feedback I am receiving is that I need
to be more proactive and visible in places like iTT and take up the
discussion with developers about packaging. From my perspective, that
means reducing the amount of repository work to some degree and
replacing that with "real time" packaging discussions, policy changes,
and other documentation.
I also think interacting in the forums and one-on-one with
developers having packaging difficulties should be a high priority.
I have started doing this and hope to do more. My radar are not as
finely tuned as your so if you see a link I ought to jump in on,
please let me know! :)
The maemo.org community seems to have a large number of very amateur
developers (myself included) who see a need and develop a solution
to fill that need. These solutions often are written in Python or
are composed of a series of shell scripts, so no compiling is
necessary. These new developers post their solutions on the forums,
and they are very appreciated by the community.
The problem then is that these amateur developers have never
packaged an application before, and they don't know how to package
the app (make a .deb) and make it available to a wider audience (put
it in Extras).
I would love to see the debmaster "pick up the slack" and help get
these applications properly packaged, and then, if the community
support is strong enough, help get the package into Extras.
I have just blogged about resources for packaging - mainly links to
get people started. (It wasn't showing up on the planet last I
checked, I have to check again.) I am going to blog about packaging a
sample python app and push more documentation to the wiki.
I'm sure the backend server stuff is important too, I just don't
know anything about it so I can't comment there.
The backend stuff is pretty important. For example, when building
packages for fremantle, certain things have changed. This means that
packages that are needed as dependencies are not getting built because
they are not conforming to the new rules. No problem, we'll just get
in touch with the packagers and tell them about the new rules. Ooops.
They didn't put their email address in the maintainer field, they
didn't follow the maemo packaging policy. We cannot reach them.
Building some simple Quality Assurance scripts on the backend repos
will catch this kind of thing and help keep the repos in good shape
for everyone, developers and users. I think this is important, but it
does not seem to be the same type of pressing need. Even if it is a
pressing need I understand the need to balance that type of work out
with visible community work, so thanks for your email qole, I
appreciate the feedback.
Jeremiah
_______________________________________________
maemo-developers mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
