[MeeGo-dev] What are you waiting for to happen in MeeGo?

[Graham Cobb]

On Saturday 06 March 2010 20:02:44 Carsten Munk wrote:
> * What are you waiting for to happen in the MeeGo project?

Announcement of what code is in/out, what the rules are around what is in/out,  
and what the processes are for community addition to the MeeGo base.  My view 
is that these points can and should be discussed, with the community, before 
the code itself is released.  There is no reason they could not have been 
discussed, at an open TSG meeting, within 2 weeks of the announcement, even 
if there were still some open issues for many particular packages.

> * Do you know what is currently blocking these things to happen, if so,
> what? 

I don't know, but I speculate that Intel and Nokia wish to present the "Day 1" 
code as the "MeeGo architecture" as a fait accompli, without community 
involvement.  In my view, there needs to be open discussion about what 
components, packages, etc form part of something allowed to call 
itself "MeeGo" and how application developers add additional things and/or 
determine if what they want is available on the particular platform.  This 
discussion, including what toolkits are initially provided, should be 
happening before the first drop of code.

> * What would you contribute with if these things happened? What area, 
> what specific things - how can you help, where's your talents in this area
> and interest?

Based on my experience in Maemo (both personal and from working with or 
watching other developers), I would propose components that should be 
included, others that should be optional, maybe some which do not appear to 
be necessary.  I would also contribute to the design of mechanisms for the 
community to port and maintain missing components and make them available 
(i.e. the repositories issue).  And, very importantly, the build, release and 
QA processes.

In addition, I would like to discuss the range of devices being supported in 
the MeeGo universe (very small or large devices, devices with no UI, etc.) 
and the tradeoffs those devices require or force on MeeGo and on the 
application developers in the community.  We have some limited experience of 
this from Maemo (as some of our applications support all Maemo devices) which 
we could add to the (mainly embedded, I think) experience of the Moblin guys 
to have some very constructive discussions.

Graham