I am wondering what other developers without a device are doing...

I have never put a package in extras-devel (let alone promoted it to extras) without having installed and tested it on the device myself and (in the case of GPE) had at least a couple of other people test it on their devices. Not only do I want to make sure I haven't made some simple mistake (e.g. with installation), I need to be able to debug and support any problems people report.

However, if we all wait for that for Fremantle it will be quite some time before lots of packages are available.

Are other developers who do not have N900's putting their packages in extras-devel as soon as they compile? I realise that some testing can be done in X86 but not everything (for example installation cannot be tested because the set of packages present on a clean device is very different from the set of packages on a clean SDK; init scripts and other startup actions cannot be verified, which is absolutely critical as it would stop the user's device from booting, etc.).

Does the community want developers to put packages into extras-devel and promote to extras-testing as soon as they compile and seem to work under X86? Or does the community want developers to wait until they have devices and can test and support their packages? There is no right answer and, as this is a tradeoff between supportability and availability of applications at launch, I suspect the answer may change over the next few months.

I would appreciate some guidance from the council, and Quim.