The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Where the hell is this documented?

Edit, a month later: Here, apparently.

Support this plan if you'd like to see this development done in public, as opposed to some arcane IRC channel at random times.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Given the Community SSU hasn't been launched yet, nowhere except a few news articles (personally, I suggest <plug>MWKN</plug>).

I assure you, when it's ready, it'll be announced to the world.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Sweet. A "community" ssu that will get "announced" instead of developed by the community. I assume MohammedAG's work will be included, but what else is there that warrants an SSU? Maybe we can get an update that removes all the links to defunct Ovi services?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I'm confused by your antagonism, which seems to be driven from a lack of information. (Although you seem to be arguing that the SSU is necessary, but also unnecessary within two sentences).

Firstly, it is being developed by the community; specifically MohammadAG and a few others. It's being openly discussed on IRC, and has been mentioned and discussed both in TMO and MWKN.

What is included, at the moment, is (OTTOMH):

• Updated hildon-desktop, hildon-home
• Modest updated to the trunk, and community patches which have been languishing on Bugzilla integrated
• PulseAudio fixes

However, most importantly, it provides a mechanism to deliver enhancements to the numerous open source components by the community, including Nokia engineers who are no longer working on them as part of their day job.

This mechanism is more important than the first tranche of fixes.

I don't know what services you're talking about; but create such a package and either users can install it via Extras or it can be installed via the SSU. However, the scope of an SSU is to update the OS components - updating HAM or hildon-desktop via Extras is problematic.

So, for example, the CSSU shouldn't contain fMMS, despite it being massively useful & popular, because it can be trivially installed from Extras.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

stenny,

do you happen to know *specifically* which web links are working/not working and where they are stored (package as well as file location)
so that this information could be put nto the SSU?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

IRC is hardly an open discussion. Is there at least a public log of the channel somewhere?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

only because you don't visit a restaurant doesn't mean it isn't open to the public.

logs are here:
https://wiki.maemo.org/IRC#Logs

Re: Ask the Council!
 

If a restaurant is open for one hour every week, but they don't say which hour, it is hardly public.

Can you point to another distribution where the main discussion and decision making is on IRC?

And of all those channels, where is "community SSU" discussed?

Can you point me to the discussion that resulted in hildon-desktop changes included in SSU? Was inclusion of kernel-power discussed?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

As I said above, at the moment the mechanism of having an SSU managed by the community is more important than the first testing release's content. As I also said, the processes around the SSU are still being formed, and will be discussed when the idea is proven to actually work.

Mohammad integrated patches and created a repo. It's been discussed in the hildon-desktop patch thread, the Modest patch thread, on maemo-developers with regards to getting HAM to recognise the repository as authorised and on maemo-community for some initial very-high level testing and feedback.

The conduit I set up to publicise potential avenues for exploration has covered it (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); so I'm not going to get drawn into another debate about the visibility of pieces of information to individuals who may have missed it.

Nor do I think a debate on the support the Council is giving to an individual (and now small team)'s efforts is appropriate or useful. If you have your own effort that you'd like the Council to support, please get in touch.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Is a patched kernel going to be included to fix the CPU speed bug when charging?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I think it's necessary but undesirable. It's basically giving Nokia carte blanche to bugger off.

Being "mentioned" is meaningless. Where has it been discussed on TMO? Where are the IRC logs? Have you learned nothing about actual open development?

Is this mechanism the same as has been done for Diablo?

the .deb package format has tons of "features" to address this sort of thing -- dpkg-divert, update-alternatives, etc. It is probably worth using them.

The services I'm specifically talking about are Ovi Files, Ovi Calendar, and all of the other services that either never worked with the n900, have stopped working with the n900, or have been dropped altogether.

I know specifically what's broken. I'll collect filesystem info and post it somewhere.

I'm going to take a step back from this conversation now, and see if you can piece together the logic of throwing up two-line posts on some third-party domain nobody's ever heard of. If that's your idea of open, you've got the wrong end of the stick.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Stenny,

What exactly are you so mad about? The fact that... the community is building a community SSU? Are you offended we didn't ask you personally for help?

You do realise that this is something that has been in the works for a very, very long time. I'm not saying we've been working our asses off every second of it, but I honestly believe we've been doing things when we could, as we could.

MWKN is hardly a website that nobody's ever heard of. It is most probably the single most concise source of general information regarding Maemo (and starting to take MeeGo hints as well). Upon every issue, a sticky thread that announces is posted. I started that stickyfying tradition (when I was a moderator), and I'm happy to see it continued, even after having left TMO quite some time ago.

If you had taken the time to search *a tiny bit*, you would've found that there is quite a bit of information available.

Googling "maemo SSU" yields one link to the Community SSU Notes, another to MWKN, a link to the maemo-developers ML discussing the community SSU and information regarding the #maemo-ssu IRC channel.

Googling "maemo community ssu" yields even more interesting results.

In other words: do not blame people trying to make a difference because you're not involved. Get involved.

Well, tough. In my case, I don't expect anything from Nokia anymore. From what I can tell, they've basically started EOL processes with regards to Maemo, and unless MeeGo steps up, the N900 is SOL.

We've never said we were experts regarding the Deb package format. I'm sure everyone would be happy to be pointed in the right direction.

If you think that's the way to talk to anyone, let alone a community member, let alone one of the most respected members of this community, then you're definitely not worth the time I invested in this post. Nor anyone else's time, for that matter.

Edit: Sorry to the mods for posting where I'm not supposed to. Rather than deleting, would it be possible to split the latest page or so that has diverted onto Community SSU trollfest into its own thread?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

This thread has been created from posts that were formerly a sub-thread within "Ask the Council!" Please continue discussion of questions and issues surrounding the development of the Fremantle community SSU here.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Okay, to be honest, I've never heard of mwkn.net until now either. Given Matan's contributions in the areas he has contributed, I think it's quite telling that he didn't know of it, or at least the SSU discussions, either.

HOWEVER, I personally understand why I am out of the loop. I'm neither useful to a serious SSU project, other than perhaps on the off chance that my verbal diarrhea provides a good idea here/there, and I haven't taken too much time to look.

So the question is, are the people *****ing actually *****ing because it's something they tried to keep themselves in the loop on, or because they are so great of contributors that they had good reason to expect someone would contact them about it as it got off the ground, OR is this just people turning their surprise at just finding out about this into anger because, well, they're humans and humans have this remarkable propensity for irrational anger?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

From my observations on past behavior. The third option, and then some. . . .

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Relax friend :) this IRC resturant is open 24/7, go in and discuss all you want mate.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

As you'll know that a lot of discussion happened in the thread "Fremantle Community SSU" on maemo-developers (a better home for in-depth technical discussion about the vagaries of HAM), which you participated in. Many of your questions then were about policy - and, as stated above, this hasn't yet been discussed (let alone decided).

OTTOMH, some of the big policy questions to be decided are:

1. Who ultimately owns the CSSU?
   • Council?
2. How will included improvements be decided? (Matan)
   • Will there be an inclusive policy - every improvement that someone is willing to work on will be included - or will there be a gatekeeper that will decide what to include? (Matan)
   • Is the scope limited to improving packages which are included by Nokia in the OS; or should it grow to include "useful" stuff?
   • Should wholesale replacement of apps (such as Media Player) be done with open source, feature- & UI-compatible versions; if available?
3. How will testing be organised?
   • Positive
   • Negative
   • Regression
   • Installation from scratch
   • Upgrade from previous version
4. How will it be advertised?
5. How will it be supported?
   • Bugzilla
   • IRC?
   • Forum

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

I suggest that anyone interested in the Maemo community reads Planet Maemo. MWKN is syndicated there (as well as TMO, forum.meego.com, Twitter, mailing lists, ...). You can read more background on why I thought MWKN was necessary in the wiki page (and the corresponding threads on Talk and on maemo-community).

See above. Matan has been involved in several SSU discussions, including here on TMO and on maemo-developers. I'm sure he didn't mean to imply he wasn't aware of the SSU work.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

That's a question for Mohammad; however, at the moment, I don't believe there's a kernel installed. You can see the packages in their gitorious home: http://gitorious.org/community-ssu - although I'm not quite sure that includes everything (e.g. there's no Modest in there with the proper quoting patches included from Bugzilla)

There's been some discussion (including with Nokians at the conference) about including a kernel. kernel-power is an obvious candidate, but without pulling in any of the settings utilities etc. Whether or not that includes the CPU speed bug fix, I don't know. As kernel-power can be installed for numerous reasons, I'm strongly of the opinion that the various user-friendly tools which allow overclocking need to display prominent warnings when exceeding 600MHz, even if they don't pull in kernel-power themselves.

Indeed, dpkg-divert is used in community-ssu-enabler to put a shim around /usr/libexec/apt-worker.

The problem with upgrading the Nokia components from Extras, and why an SSU is required, is that Application Manager (i.e. HAM) will not upgrade packages from different package "domains" which have different trust levels.

One of the primary tasks of community-ssu-enabler is to add the repository at an appropriate trust level, so that HAM will allow it to upgrade "system" packages. (In addition to installing the repo and GPG key).

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I've put that list on the wiki, but wikis are bad places to have discussions. I'd suggest one of maemo-developers, maemo-community or talk.maemo.org would be best.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

They already have, and they didn't need permission from anybody.

So it's either the community heavyweights taking over, or the N900 ends up in a drawer shortly, as the 770, N800 et N810 before it (which would be *even more* of a shame).

Personally I am grateful to those taking this initiative to extend the platform's useful life, especially those tackling not the code but the organisational issues... which usually prove the most difficult, because good hackers often have bad temper also :-)

Apart from that, this thread is a lot of fun, and the posters' list reads like an ITT/TMMO Who's Who :-)

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Just a reminder: There's a one-line patch in https://bugs.maemo.org/6009 that will fix a bug with X Terminal. I personally used a version of vte patched with that patch for several months already, and it works great. Would be nice to have it in the CSSU :)

Similarly, another one-liner against the same package (vte) fixes the dark grey color, the patch is in https://bugs.maemo.org/7164 and works fine.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

how up to date are the files from th CSSU from here: http://mohammadag.xceleo.org/repo/
could i install those files without risk on my PR1.3 ?

what are the benefits?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Not at all, AFAIK.

No.

You get to test whether the CSSU process works and whether or not seamless upgrades happen without stiffing your device & requiring a reflash or manual recovery steps involving R&D mode.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Interesting. This thread is the first I've ever heard of a Community SSU for Fremantle, and I thought I was keeping reasonably decent track of Maemo developments somehow. Whoops! ;)

While I'm not personally hit or bothered by this - partly because I don't exactly monitor every single community communications channel (I frankly don't know where to regularly look anyways, other than this forum and having a RSS reader pointed at Planet Maemo), but mostly because the chances of my being able to helpfully contribute are likely somewhere between "snowball's chance in hell" and "you're kidding, right?" - I would be concerned if this project turns out to be quiet enough that y'all end up missing out on potentially helpful contributors and/or bugfixes.

Is there a plot to manage that possibility, or am I being overly paranoid?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

/offtopic
IMO people behind MWK could put up maemo.org twitter account where they post anything related to maemo that they find interesting. We would at least have one source from where people could get all interesting stuff in real-time.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

The important thing to realise is that the Community SSU is only just getting started: lots of exciting contributions can come when the kinks are worked out (done); the process is drafted (no-one concerned about being involved has yet answered a single one of the questions I posted above, I note) and the brave have verified that installing the SSU doesn't fundamentally break ones device (probably done).

You mean exactly like the @mwkn account on Twitter? ;-)

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Can i already subscribe to the equivalent of the plain Extras repo in the CSSU for the N900 so when stuff start popping in there i'll already have everything set waiting for it? If yes, how please?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Sigh...Well for some reason I´m not surprised that I didn´t know that this exists. This place needs "web 2.0" designer and ad team to markets these things. :)

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Challenge accepted. :) Assuming it's possible to contribute $0.02US here...

Council sounds good to me, personally.

I'd stick to improving existing OS packages, and let "useful" stuff stay in Extras. If the community wants to get involved in endorsing other nice things (like, oh, I dunno, fMMS or similar), that sounds like a separate project to me. Ditto for FOSS replacements of closed Maemo apps.

Or, IOW, I wouldn't mind having the ability to, say, uninstall Modest (since I never use it), but I don't want that sort of silly side preference to hold up getting other bugfixes going quickly.

Managing software testing is not something I'm good at; that's more my mother's province. :) Maybe it might be useful to identify volunteers who are willing to handle possible test cases?

Have Council members rent out billboards in their hometowns. Duh! ;)

I'm assuming advertising means to end-users, not necessarily developers. For those, mwkn and this forum ought to be enough. For developers... well, I don't really count as one, so I don't know what they're paying attention to. :D

I would assume a mix of Bugzilla and the forums (as is seemingly standard for most of the software here) would be ideal - Bugzilla for folks who can write decent bug reports, and forums for the me-too crowd.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Thanks for the input, much appreciated.

Agreed.

The reason I mentioned FOSS replacements is that they've currently got a hard-dependency into the image, making installation of replacements harder. However, it could well be the same solution for both of your requirements: I think the CSSU could ensure that nothing depends on modest or mediaplayer, allowing an Extras package in Section: user/multimedia to come in and replace it; or an advanced user to do apt-get remove modest etc.

For example, from mp-fremantle-generic-pr (the core SSU):

Once the SSU is installed, having something which replaces all aspects of it becomes easier. A few random thoughts OTTOMH:

1. Would the Open Media Player want to be installable alongside the original one?
2. If it was designed to replace it, would the main package in Extras depend on community-ssu-enabler?
3. Could it work that Open Media Player is installable alongside, but has a small sibling package - or menu option - to remove the original one and slide into its place: iff the CSSU is installed?

Re: Ask the Council!
 

The new media player should replace the old one completely as part of the Community ssu.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Is the intent for the SSU to work towards possible replacements for lower level nokia closed binaries (e.g. things like bme or the connectivity libraries)?

More specifically would such things be accepted if someone was to create replacements (and if they were properly tested and etc)?

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

The CSSU itself is a delivery mechanism. It could deliver those if they existed.

That's a much better policy question :-)

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Regarding the FOSS replacements, perhaps it would be good to have one repo for replacements that completly replicate the original functionality (even the quirkier rarelly used options, there is always someone that will miss them), leaving those untouched except for bug fixes (and other fixes that doesn't do away with functionalities nor does any major reworking of the parts of the programs users deal with), and have a separated repo for the more radical replacements (perhaps make some sort of standard for version numbers giving the ones in the radical repo a huge distance ahead of the plain recreations repo so that at least until a century or so from now the version numbers in the plain replacements repo will never reach the earliest version in the radical repo, or just use fractional version numbers on the plain repo and in the radical repo use the fractional part to indicate what plain version the radical was based on and the rest of the number for the actual version number for the radical repls. ; or whatever you guys consider the best way to do it )


edit: the plain and the rad repls. repos could each have -testing and -devel companions like extras, or whatever you think is better

Re: Ask the Council!
 

Oh dear (diety name here), please do not make things depend on other things unless they literally are the only thing that could realistically be expected to make it work.

Even if Open Media Player is supposed to replace the main package, it should be left to the end user to make that decision unless a horribly un-work-around-able reason makes it a PITA to make that happen. Even if your Open Media Player is the best media player that ever walked the earth, someone will want to have both on their system, and if they want it, they should be able to have it. So no ____ conflicts with _____ just because some dev didn't think normal people wouldn't want both, no ____ depends on ______ unless the latter actually HAS TO have the former, and if you're going to do that you should also be watchful of other things that other developers might make that fulfill that dependency. (EG, Kernel Power Settings shouldn't depend on JUST Kernel Power, it should optionally depend on kernel power, UBoot-for-kernel-power, and any other package that flashes the power kernel to your kernel partition. Etc.)

So I say the latter is fine, however, the ideal solution in my opinion is just exterminate all the 'dependencies' that aren't actually necessary when you make the CSSU (IE, no, my FreOffice, FM Radio, or whatever else I want, does not depend on my having the preinstalled hildon-application-manager on the device, and don't you dare try to tell me otherwise Nokia), but don't make it so that the new stuff replaces dependencies - someone might not want to have a media player on their device, at all. That's odd, and that's unlikely as hell, but it's feasible enough that if someone does feel that way, they should be able to do it without having to muck around with .deb control files for every little thing.

So, my recommendation is, kill the unnecessary dependencies, don't make any new ones unless they literally HAVE TO be there, and everyone developing the FOSS replacements to the closed source apps, I say do the same thing: Don't stick any conflicts between the two unless they have to be there.

Re: The in-development Maemo 5 Community SSU
 

Simplified version of Mentalist Traceur's post (which I largely agree with):
Please endeavor whereever possible to have conflicts-depends based on technical necessity, not End-User Experience or politics or what someone else thinks might be nifty or whatever. Maybe we could have someone add Recommends: display support to fapman (or the original HAM), if such a delivery mechanism is absolutely needed. :D

Personally, though, I say for the starting effort, stay focused on bugfixes for the apps we can get to. I don't know enough about how Maemo does its dependencies to know whether or not it's worthwhile to try to uncouple End User-Experience type apps from the base OS or not. I'd love the option... but I'm more interested in getting silly bugs fixed without having to install .debs by hand. :) Stuff like that can always be added in later updates, anyways, IMO.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

I've added a new one:

• At what point do bugs get set to RESOLVED FIXED? Such as #3700

Re: Ask the Council!
 

In my opinion....

1. The CSSU should be owned and steered by the council, for the good of the community.

2. Improvements should be limited to bugfixes, and improvements to the core OS. I think either seperate packages should be created for replacement of core apps, or a metapackage which will offer the ability to install apps such as MAG's portrait varients, and the new QT media player. A good example of how this could be implemented is the Maemodder package, which lets you pick and easily install common mods via GUI, and allows regression. An alternative for OS alternatives may be as a distinct section within the Repos, and to prefix the packages appropriately so "upgrades/replacements" can be easily found.

3. Testing - should be as an upgrade from PR1.3, with regression back to it on removal. Testing should also be limited to the specific fixes/enchancements which have been changed, otherwise it'll take ages.

4. Should be advertised by forum initially for keen/adventurous/power users, and then barring any major issues, be advertised heavily on the seperate sections of maemo.org including MWN.

5. Official support should be via bugzilla for confirmed issues, There will be forum threads regarding any CSSU anyway.

Re: Ask the Council!
 

from the bug report page...

I would suggest when the CSSU has been launched and passed widespread testing.