Hi all,
I'm the main developer for the maemo5 Mapper, and it seems I've got a severe issue: the device can freeze while using my application.

The reason is not totally clear, but it seems that it's not the application's fault (in fact, the same issue was reported for Maep), but most likely a SGX driver issue. It is somehow related to these bugs:
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8689
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9150

You can also read a report from a tester here:
http://maemo.org/packages/package_in...per/3.0+beta2/

In my experience, this issue happens when application banners or system notifications appear on top of Mapper. I've had a chance to try Mapper on an internal development version of PR1.2, and it seems that these problems are not reproducible there. But on the other hand, I have no idea when PR1.2 will be made available.

Now, I could try to workaround these issue by removing all banners from Mapper, and also by setting the do-not-disturb mode so that no desktop banners will appear on top of it, and hope that this would hide the issue. But on the other hand, is it worth the effort?
(it may actually be that I will end up removing most of the banners anyways, as I find them useless/annoying )

Or should I add a dialog at the start of the application that says "If you see a banner or desktop notification, don't touch the device till it's gone, or your device might freeze!"?

Or should we just remove Mapper from Extras & Extras Testing until PR1.2 is released?
I wouldn't like it too much, as it seems that many people are using it and enjoying it, but if PR1.2 is coming out soon, it might even be the best solution.

Opinions?

By the way, I should stress a bit more that this thing about banners and notifications being the (indirect) cause of the freezes is just my hypothesis, and it may be that even removing them we'll still have problems.

I'd say leave the packages in extras-devel only for those that want them despite the known instability problems and let "normal" users wait for PR1.2.

+1 on that, if you want to do it for independent reasons :-)

Mapper working fine with me , no freeze at all.

but the Offline GPS not working, although i heard from someone the Mapper it is only program making GPS working offline.

Any idea?


P.S.: not using any of Extra testing or devil

Works fine for me. By the way, for specific questions about Mapper please ask in the Mapper's forums:
https://garage.maemo.org/forum/?group_id=29

If it has such known issues, it probably should not be in Extras, at least (but it is a great app!). I haven't noticed much of it, but then I've only used it a couple of times.

Wrong section for this topic, but I've asked for it to be moved.

I have done a fair amount of testing and I too have managed to get the device to "freeze", but it never has occurred when I have been running Mapper by itself or even in conjunction with just MfE.

Indeed the device does not "freeze", it actually become very unresponsive. This can occur when using many applications at once or particularly heavy or flash based web sites.