I don't know whether this is a topic for maemo-developers, here or a sprint task. I was just trying to kick off the discussion.

With all the problems you point out...

I still think it's worth to open the maemo-testing door. First because we need to test and probably fine tune the own promotion from devel to testing. Better to do it now that things are relatively calm than when a final release is out and everybody is in a rush.

Actually it is good to note that we haven't agreed on the criteria and process to promote a package from -devel to -extras (or have we?). That would be a good start. There was this maemo-developers thread and there is a wiki page, but no conclusions AFAIR.

In principle the promotion is meant to be automatic: the maintainer of a package thinks it meets the -testing criteria and pushes a botton. Then the automatic process runs some automatic checks and either promotes it or keeps it in -devel. So we need to agree on the criteria, see what can be automated now and put the trust on the developers for the rest.

My initial proposal for -testing quality criteria was:

We should add "The developers thing it's ready for testing".

And that's it. The fine-tuning and polishing belongs more to the promotion from extras-testing to extras. I agree with you that it is difficult for most hobbyist developers to go through this task without a final SDK, a product announced and an idea about the sales start date.

Clearly the current situation doesn't help getting applications polished. We can't give any dates for further SDK releases, but we consider this Beta 2 quite stable. Fremantle is in pure bugfix mode targeting the final release. The plan is to have a pre-final SDK release that will become the final either without changes or through a minor update synchronised with the Maemo 5 final release.

About the origin of the package dependency problems... The fact is with 120 apps around it's difficult to keep track of the broken dependencies created by the Package Policy, the ones caused by dependencies on deprecated components, the Python related problems... You don't know whether the developer is aware or not, whether it's in the top priority or anyway he is working on other stuff first, whether he actually wants to push that app to end users using Extras or is just playing around.

If the promotion to extras-testing is open then we can focus on the feedback of the developers willing to push their packages. And we can focus the human testing on the apps making it there.