Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Just logging in to state this - before any of you are attending the 10 april meeting, please read through the minutes and logs above and understand that for any given community-hosted service/app store there is a range of problems.

We'll try to set up a meeting on the 10th, it wasn't directly decided as noted in the e-mail but we'll probably have a sync to move things forward. Mer-general archive and information is at http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Mailing_lists

Some problems:

1) Cost of hardware and handling donations, including checks and balances, setup of legal entities
2) Legal implications (who gets the nastygrams) if we distribute patented or otherwise copyrighted material we aren't permitted to distribute because of a user uploading it.
3) Who contributes and maintains support for the various build targets (Mer, MeeGo, Harmattan, Fremantle) within the OBS.

For 2), from Mer point of view, we're a proper open source project (soon with some non-profit established) with no legal department or corporate hosts that can easily fight back when we get attacked because of random-user's upload of some pirated ROM in a N900 NES emulator to a community OBS.

That is also noted in the minutes that we're working to find a way to do this without risking Mer's core mission and Mer's ability for others to build upon it without worrying it'll go away due to a legal threat.

The other side of the coin is that such shared services are needed to properly grow communities, because in this world, it's not enough to just put up a repository, you need to provide security updates, make it easy to find the software, not just your typical output of a SDK.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Great. What I meant is that maemo should discuss what we want before the IRC chat. I'm sure the people from Mer, KDE, etc., would appreciate if we didn't take up their time in the meeting talking about internal maemo topics.

Anybody who cares to comment, I would really like to understand better what this change implies for the future of maemo. Of course, IRC is not necessary for this - we can do it asynchronously via forum or ML.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Agenda for April 10 meeting, at http://www.mail-archive.com/mer-gene...msg00413.html:

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Correct. So far so good.

However it also made me the package maintainer for Diablo, and retroactively applied that error to existing packages that I never touched, taking away the credit from the people who did the actual hard work. I'm not necessarily arguing for resources to be spent fixing it (if no one cared in 2010 it's way too late now) but surely that isn't working "like it should".

Then someone else came along and uploaded new versions (I didn't mind at all btw, that's not the point) from a different account but without remembering to change the Maintainer field: and the system accepted them just fine and gave me credit for those too :-/

So if one wants to take over a package without the previous maintainer's approval it doesn't seem like much of a problem.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Guys, again: it's great that we're all passionate one way or another about this or that aspect of the discussion, but I ask again that the rhetoric come down and stay down a few hundred degrees. There's just no point in picking at old wounds, especially when the causes look to be more perceived than real anyway, and pissing contests are better held in Off Topic..

Thanks for your understanding. I really, really don't want to moderate this thread.

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Noticed that too, it felt really weird -- to see the maintainer approval request for a package with the same package already being on the "Latest builds" list. (So much for QA! :D )

Btw, OBS Diablo target anyone? I could give that a few minutes... if I ever manage to get a working OBS virtual machine appliance ;). It is probably harder than a few minutes though...

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Appreciating Your good will (no irony here), but what exactly are You referring to? It seems to me, that this thread is quite meritocratic, and much less emotional than "council Election" was just few pages ago.

If You don't want to "point finger at", I'll also be happy via PM answer with example. Really, I'm not trying to argue/being ironical, just wanting to understand what You exactly mean.

/Estel

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

Sorry, I think some guys are asking too much from Maemo developers : that the packages will have warranty of future updates to be promoted to extras ! Future for 1 year ? 3 years ? It is nonsense...

The package that is in extras-testing, is well voted and tested, IMHO, should be automatically promoted without the maintainer. If a critical problem/bug is found in any extras software (with or without maintainer), the super-testers could have the hability of removing the software (in very rare cases).

Do you guys think that all software in Maemo.org extras, Nokia Store, App Store and Android Market have current maintainers ?

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

I was thinking of more than one thread, but for the most part you're correct: this one is ok overall, but I saw one example of things possibly heating up again. If you read through you should see it, but if need be I can PM the link.

Back to the discussion...

Re: Community projects having problems with infrastucture
 

No. I just would be more strict on promoting clearly abondoned packages currently stuck in testing to extras. Open source software has the usual "as is" warranty and at least I'm not pushing to change that at all. It's more about discussion on what is considered stable (enough) for extras.