[Council] Ask the Council!
 

...Council is starting thread, where everyone can ask current Council about anything related to Community and Council activities (surprised, judging by misleading title, eh? ;) ).

Traditionally, it's not only a place for pure Q&A between members and current Councilors - past (and future ;) ) Councilors are welcome as well, and cross-talks between users are allowed, as long as they move discussions forward.

Cheers,

/Estel

EDIT: "Ask the Council!"-history you will find over here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=41451

Re: [Council] Ask the Council! | May-November 2012 dadence.
 

QGil,

glad you were able to make your voice heard ¦-)))))))))))))))
hummm... 28-05-12 , 17:47 and 28-05-12 , 20:23

to the OP... what is dadence suppose to mean?

EDIT: submitted a request this thread being deleted due to the title & title got edited :)
thanks for that!

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Hello Council,

I have a question about how to become maintainer for new package. I created curl and I'm in pending state for more than one month.
I tried to find the way but I see no way. I saw more people has the same problem.

What is the right way to solve this?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Not in the council but commenting anyway..

curl is not really a new package. For example libcurl3 comes with the device rootfs and sdk so are you sure everything depending on it works as they should with this version of curl?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Curl, like any other system package, should be distributed only via CSSU. In fact, it's already included:

http://gitorious.org/community-ssu/curl

Please contact the main CSSU developers if you are interested in maintaining this (or other) system packages. Best way to talk with them is on IRC #maemo-ssu.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

There is one important question to ask:

"merlin1991 guys, who drove the bus that did knock out Mag? 16:16"

So? Who is responsible for hiting our CSSU-T developer?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

What's the plan about funding this site once Nokia stops its current funding?
From past discussion it was come into talk about Nokia to stop funding this site after December of 2012, is that true? If not where is the written statement from Nokia stating that?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

It is not.

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...il/005031.html

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

It would be bad for Nokia to stop funding Maemo.org simply because they very know all and any support for Maemo and Meego comes from within this community so until Nokia goes down i am sure funding will continue.

So nothing to worry about i am sure.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

After several chats with people familiar with the way Nokia does things, I can tell you that Nokia currently has no plans for defunding Maemo.org or any of it's facilities. If they do, we will very likely get anywhere from 6 months to a years forewarning. (Much like the Meego sites got, many months ago.)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Woody,

thank you for this comforting update.
isn't it true that NOKIA has been pushing to integrate MeeGo / Harmattan more with Maemo.org (again) since then?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Council from the last term (and continuing into this term) has been quietly doing that for some time now. This includes updating some of the infrastructure, which involves Nokia to a small extent. Work on it was slow going before because of the fiasco that has been Nokia over the past year. With the return of a few key people things are progressing nicely. We're not there yet, but there will be a few visible changes over the next few months.

Also, council meeting logs are being posted to the blog, for those interested.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Well they should exactly what you are supposedly saying woody cuz otherwise they would loose another bunch of nokia mobile users on this planet we call earth.maemo.org has always been full of intellectuals and brilliant minds over the glob and guess what after being bored from apple or ad-droid a lot of people coming towards the open source and mainly for maemo/meego/mer and nemo.plasma KDE is also getting a lot of love.Customization is what really drawing people towards maemo.It is simply brilliant . Rest hope for the best to occur .

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

I know it's friendly and community place, but lately, especially with N9 out (while it was less geek and more end user phone) there are a lot of new members and people, who not really going thru forum rules. E.g. : Post before search, bump and just ask developers about updates, telling that some of the apps stupid or useless. While it's disrespect to developers, who actually wrote something for harmattan/maemo. As not a lot of companies, devs support those platforms =( And i don't see too many action from moderator. Is there any way to make politics more strick or any plans on that?
P.S. I ask council and all those telling, it's open forum and freedom of speech people can just get this msg as my freedom of speech.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

the Council has no authority on TMO (Talk Maemo Org)
it is up to the owner of the site (Reggie) and his team of moderators to police TMO.
under every post's date is a link (Report This) that goes straight to the moderators.
like most thing here, it is community driven.

as to the N9 being a "mass product";
it was an attempt by NOKIA to go back to the "unibody" design of the early Maemo devices (770 & N800) without hardware keyboard.

as the accessories market on eBay seems to prove (a lot of hw kbd for iPotato device(s)) hw kbd isn't only a gadget for geeks.
anyone who has to write a lot of text (e-mails?) on a mobile needs it

N900 probably is the best Communicator NOKIA had... since the Communicator :D

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Hi

Before I can promote qt-components-10 to extras, I need some clarification about it's dependences, and the proper way to push it into maemo packaging infraestructure.

qt-components has two main soft requirements:

• nokia pure fonts: Nokia pure is internally used as the default font for components like Label, Button, etc. Althought fremantle version could make use of some sort of 'theme system' to change default font to one selected by user, changes introduced on nokia-pure PR1.2 http://www.developer.nokia.com/Commu...ger-and-better makes a bit tough to perfect pixel UIs for both, Harmattan and Fremantle devices.
• icons from blanco theme: They aren't open but we can use on Fremantle and community projects like Mer.

According to @qgil post http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...65&postcount=4 We have a 'go ahead' to push those requirements, the question is where. A webfont version of nokia-pure is already on free-extras (ttf-nokiapure) but this post http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...1&postcount=59 says that 'grey packages' should go on non-free repo. Where's the problem? Problem is that IIRC, we can promote a package that had dependences on non-free packages.

Question is, How I should proceed. I can package non-free icons on blanco-theme package and add a hard dependence to it on qt-components-10 package. I can also update a new nokia-fonts package with Harmattan PR1.2 fonts to extras-devel and also add a hard dependence to it. This is the easiest approach and It allow people to also work on a set of free-icons deployed with base theme http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=84802 to be used on Non Nokia platforms (BB10)

I've already send a private message to @laasonen to see If he can update ttf-nokiapure package. I've already packaged nokia-pure fonts, and I can push to extras-devel, but I prefer to use their package if it's updated properly.

I also want to ask removal of qt-components package. It doesn't contain platform adaptation and brings a lot of confusion.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Hi inean, thanks for bringing it here.

The approach that you comment seems to be the more appropriate. I understand that the non-free icons should be in a separate package than blanco-theme, though.

The problem here is about promoting packages that depend on a non-free package. I must admit I had no idea that this was a problem, we will address this question to X-Fade, but I think that in the meantime you should be OK to push the packages to devel.

Regarding the package ttf-nokiapure, if you don't receive an answer from the original maintainer, please ask him for maintenance and even if you don't get answer, you can come back here and we will then grant you the permissions.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

For those interested, meeting minutes for the last council meeting are updated on the Council Blog.

Sorry for the delay, but I was away and unable to post them internally until Monday, then delayed until Tuesday for review. :)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

It seems impossbile to get the rights for Extras, devel. The approvel is not working since no one is doing this since the last guy left or fired(who knows)

Is there anything the council can do. Ask someone whats going on?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Do you mean to get the approval to upload to Extras Devel?

Is that's the case, there is an automatic response email saying that the maintainer is not working on it any more but after a few days, you should receive the approval. For me it took about 3 or 4 days.

In any case, this is something to talk with X-Fade, at least to try to disable the automatic email.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Alright, Council, any comments to this: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1223149

I suppose you guys have connections to the guys/company hosting us?
I hope you guys are the correct ones to address this issue to.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

actually the question is about....
There goes as well the budget for funding maemo.org and paying the salaries of whoever has still a relationship with this community
as i already posted in the thread referred to by Wonko, there is no mention of MeeGo/Harmattan in the original post
??? :confused:

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

imho, its time for the council to start atleast discussions and planning for alternatives if in the worst case maemo.org is to be shut down on 31st Dec 2012.
we keep hearing that atleast 6 months notice will be provided but there is no confirmation from anyone in authority from Nokia (no offence to qgil or anyone from Nokia posting on these boards).
Its already mid-June and we have less than 6 months to Dec end 2012 - the date till which maemo.org will definitely be running.
A community thread can be started right away.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Sure, it's never too early to plan ahead anyway, and with most of the freebie device nonsense ending today I guess that's next.

I think you'll find that's a bit more than 6 months ;-)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

We received a private email from qgil explaining the situation this Friday and was part of the Council meeting, as you can check in the logs and the minutes that will be published soon.

However, we have not entered into details yet. First of all, we don't have all the information and we need not to panic.

Indeed, in the following weeks this is going to be a hot topic and we will discuss deeply about the current situation and the future.

Please stay tuned as this is a difficult situation and we will need all your help to drive it appropriately.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

two words of advice to take to heart in the coming months...
;)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

hello council,

These thoughts occured to me after reading the theme maker thread.

Our community and essentially all opensource communities work because of code reuse, and dependencies are a great way to reuse other community code without having to worry about it's maintenance. Especially on a mobile device where storage is precious, dependencies are even more important. Imagine having to statically link and include every other piece of software you need for your application to function.

In Fremantle this problem is solved brilliantly with maemo extras. In Harmattan we have Apps For MeeGo but there lies a chicken-and-egg problem. As it is not preinstalled, there isn't enough user base and as there isn't enough user base developers prefer the ovi store for deployment, which however does not support dependencies to other community applications/libraries.

After the recent announcements it is even more clear that the N9 should rely on our support and not Nokia's so having the infrastructure that will make the developers life easier is vital. I propose that we do whatever we can to influence Nokia to include the appsformeego client in the next software update. It should not conflict with their interests as all the apps hosted in the community repository are free so there will be no lost value on their end.

I know that now this must be very difficult but I believe now is even more important than before. An effort like saera would be futile without proper dependency support, as well as many other projects, from simple scripts like my own sms160 to full-fledged applications.

Thanks for your time.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

i would add my 2 cents here. As far as i know apps4meego does not support libraries and deps too, so you need to build them in. I think that should be re-thinked. as it makes it more like ovi or other market, while i think most would prefer the linux-way repos, where you can submit not only user apps, but libraries, tools and so on...

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Like on Android?:D

As far as I remember, the Extras repository wasn't preinstalled in Fremantle either untill PR1.1 or other update (correct me if I'm wrong). Maybe it could be preinstalled in PR1.3? (but is it being maintained by Nokia?)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Extras was preinstalled after PR1.2 (maybe even earlier) and was renamed to maemo.org (I still have both the official and my own maemo extras testing - one is disabled of course)

And anyway the client was there. On the N9 there isn't even the indication that a community repo exists. Just a link to apps4meego would do the job almost as well. (like the installer icons on N900, although it should be preinstalled in my opinion)

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

It was a conscious decision to have Extras or equivalent out of the pre-installed image in Harmattan. Reverting that decision in normal circumstances would have been extremely difficult but in the current situation I personally see it as basically impossible.

The main reason to keep the community repositories out of the pre-installed / offical image was to have a clear separation with any software coming from those sources in case any legal problem would arise. You have seen the escalation in legal battel in the mobile context. From the many risks around, this one was a risk Nokia didn't want to take.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Once again because of crazy world and all those patents (i heard story about youtube complained on some video because sound of air is patented — http://www.mdotstrange.com/2012/06/y...-own-film.html ) the end user suffers the most =)

And what about adding one more repo for apps4meego for libraries and deps? AFAIK now it's made only for apps, and you need to include deps inside package

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

The problem with the repositories affects the vote of the "testers"?

Or just people don't vote anymore for apps in testing?

A few like ivgalvez (at least is one of the most constant, no offense other who test and votes too) for name someone, always test and vote.

Greetings.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

What problem are you referring to? These days I'm on vacation and I don't have too much time to check the nearly 40 Maemo related emails per day and all the TMO stuff so probably I'm missing something.

I'm actually running a process to contact developers that have apps ready for promotion to do that final step, but it's going slow, specially due to the Comminity Awards (it took several hours of work for processing submissions, prepare the Wiki an notify winners). At the end, I'm afraid, we will need to promote manually a big number of applications (without an active maintainer).

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

i mean the problem that new developers can't put new programs on devel (Saera case for example) , if that affects in any way the vote or is just that people don't test and vote anymore?

Greetings.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

There was a separate queue that was not automated and not on someones to-check list after the Nokia cuts. That issue should be resolved now.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

So is problem of people don't test and vote anymore.

Is there any way the council encourage devs and "testers"?

The council can promote just from testing? Not from devel to testing?

Greetings.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Is anyone already trying to make a list of such "orphaned" packages? (maybe you, if you're trying to contact devs, you should be the first person to be asked whether package has active maintainer or not) If we had a list, maybe it would be easier for some developers willing to participate in our community to "adopt" them and maintain them further at at least basic level? This way we would lighten Council's load a bit.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Ivgalvez already has a rather extensive list, though I'm sure if you have one he would be happy to have it to verify if there are any missing. This has been an on-going project for him since before Council elections as he's also head of the super-testing squad.

And yes, anyone willing to take-on maintainership of an abandoned project is more than welcome to make such offers. I believe the consensus is that we'd rather have a maintainer to push the packages vs doing so without one.

(I'm only answering because he's on vacation and may not get back to your post quickly. ;) )

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Yes I have limited connection this week, thanks for picking it up Woody.