New 2006 OS Application Catalog: contrib
 

For those of you finding yourself with far too many one-off Application Catalogs in your Application Manager, the Garage is trying to consolidate its 24 hosted projects under a single contrib Catalog:

Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/contrib/
Distribution: 2.0
Components: free

"non-free" is also available, but nothing is in it yet (which is good - keep software free!).

The "free" component contains at least Maemo Mapper (the as-yet-unannounced v1.0.2, no less) and my load-applet-run package, consequently making the gnuite.com repository obsolete. Hopefully there are more to come as other Garage developers start populating the repository with their own packages.

Many thanks to Ferenc Szekely for setting this up for us! It's another step toward the future of the Nokia 770!

Successfully used this to update meamo-mapper.

Definitely a cool initative.

- Neil.

When setting up the Application catalogue entries, can you enter "free" and "non-free" in the components field, or do you need to create a seperate entry for each?

They can be space-separated in the "Components" field. I think that's why the field name is plural.

What are the requirements to get applications into this repository? Is it automatically available for projects registered at garage.maemo.org? Any details would be welcome.

The process is still being developed, and I don't know all the details (Ferenc would know those), but from what I understand, it is currently being offered to Maemo Garage developers on an invite basis.

If your UFO2000 port for Maemo hasn't yet found a home, consider setting up shop at the Garage. It is a quite functional GForge-based site with many features, including MS Project-like task scheduling.

I see, I will track the news.

Actually I'm also an upstream developer, so sourceforge is used for hosting the project and all the maemo related fixes are committed directly to project SVN. I just wonder if it is worth also registering at garage for providing maemo .deb packages downloads or sourceforge file release system is good enough for this kind of packages too. A repository at garage might be one of the reasons to use it in the future, so it is quite interesting :)

Well, ufo2000 port has a long way before being complete. We just barely managed to reduce memory footprint and optimized performance to run it more or less acceptable on Nokia 770. User interface improvements for a comfortable playing the game using stylus and available controls still have to be done. More performance optimizations are also needed.

What troubles me is that I find it somewhat discouraging to have no feedback at all. I think that having someone to try the game at an early stage of porting would really help. The game is not end user ready yet and can't be added to the application catalog, also I'm not sure if it is worth registering at maemo-apps.org right now because it would probably get a lot of negative reviews and they will impact the game later. Maybe some other developers have similar problems, so it would be good to build up a friendly and active community and help each other, probably here in the forum :)

Serge: I was wondering if you were the same person as on the UFO2000 forums... I've been reading that thread on and off for months just waiting for the port to come out. Ultimately your call so far as releasing goes but, in my opinion, if you branded it a beta people would most likely be accepting of any issues. (Lots of the user base learned what 'beta' meant when they jumped the gun and moved to the 2006 OS) ;)

The port of UrQuan Masters went through a few versions with marked improvements as well.

I think that's a matter of preference... If you're comfortable working directly in the SourceForge SVN (either in the trunk or on a branch) and don't anticipate a lot of maemo-specific noise in the trackers or task managers, then that is probably sufficient. It can't be too difficult to add a maemo-specific .deb file to a ufo2000 release, and Nokia 770 users will always be able to download and install a .deb file directly (i.e. without using a repository).

On the other hand, it's generally not too difficult to transfer between (for example) a maemo-specific SVN trunk in Maemo Garage and a maemo-specific SVN branch in SourceForge. And it might give your project more visibility with Nokia 770 users.

All else equal, I'd say go with whatever feels more comfortable for you.

This is, of course, always an issue in early development (whether from scratch or with a complex port). No matter how much warning you give, there are always going to be people complaining that the software is too buggy! I tend to just ignore those people that didn't pay attention to the warnings. But other people may see it as a sign to stay away from the software completely.

An alternative is to provide an invite-only test process, such that people who have clearly and sufficiently been made aware of the current situation can be allowed to test the software and provide feedback. This, of course, limits the amount of feedback you can get, but in the very early stages of development, it may be enough.

Coming from a professional usability background, though, I think that the benefit of early feedback probably outweighs the possibility of early rejection. Let the floodgates open and let people start filing new bug reports as soon as possible. Of course, if there's still a lot of basic work to be done, it makes more sense to finish that before you make a public release, since there isn't much use in collecting usability feedback if you're still buried in technical issues.