Hackfest proposed (was RE: Summary of GNOME Mobile GUADEC BOF)

[<quim gil nokia com>]

Thanks for the summary, Dave. 

Apologies for my absence in the meeting. One part of my brain knew when was the mobile meeting, but apparently that morning only the part of my brain reading the printed program was awake... Shame on me.


>One more thing - I will mail separately about this, but to

I can take this ball that started rolling through the board and mobile private lists.

First let me clarify the offer:
 
>help provide that technical win I mentioned, Nokia have 
>offered to host (alongside the Maemo Summit) a GNOME Mobile 
>hackfest in Berlin,

Not Mobile only. One of the reasons why I started asking the board and not the mobile lists was because I was trying to get a mission that even if it's originated from the mobile side it has a clear benefit for the whole GNOME project. 

I think this is benefitial not only to Maemo/Nokia's image but to the whole GNOME Mobile effort. People see (in the best case) that the GNOME Mobile related teams are doing things but in many cases these things are seen as departures/divergences from "the desktop". What many of them don't see are all the features and optimizations done for the mobile that are improving the desktop-as-in-laptop-and-pc. 

>on the two days following OSiM World, the 19th and 20th of September.

Not two days but as many as the hackers want, like the previous GTK+ Hackfest. Coincidence with the Maemo Summit is appreciated since this is where I can get the budget from and is a good chance to approach the Maemo community to upstream developers and the other way round.

More about the Maemo Summit at http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008

>This happens the weekend before 
>the final GNOME 2.24 release, which also gives us an 
>opportunity to have a GNOME Mobile release party a couple of 
>days early ;)

This is a nice idea. If someone wants to show a preview let me know and I will add it to the schedule.

>To have a successful hackfest, you need:
> - A tightly defined agenda (one or two problems to solve - 
>see introspection in GTK+ as a good example from the GTK+ summit)
> - The right people present
> - Focus on results, few distractions (what comes out of the 
>meeting at the end?)
>
>It mighht be useful, if we're working on API, to have some 
>application developers consuming the API present, as well as 
>the people working on the library itself. It might also be 
>useful to have someone from the layer below the library there. 

Yes, yes and yes.

>One example that comes to mind (and which was suggested by 
>Quim) is GStreamer. It would make sense to have at least one 
>or two GStreamer "consumers" there, and perhaps someone from 
>the ALSA or PulseAudio projects too.
>
>So - there lies the idea - gather a small group of people, 
>focussed on a specific problem that is fixable (or, at least, 
>which can be worked to a proof-of-concept design & code) after 
>a 2 day hackfest. Ideas, suggestions?

In the mobile private list the proposal went at the end more in the direction of Tracker. The reasons explained:

Another candidate, perhaps even more interesting for being a younger component: http://live.gnome.org/Tracker . Used by many, hacked by many. People think of it for the desktop and in fact Nokia and others are putting it to work to solve the problems of users with small devices capable of acquiring and storing plenty of files and data, capable also to be connected to servers and other devices with more data and files. The desktop benefits from these improvements just as much.

Matthew says:
> How about looking at hacking on something we're missing rather than 
> something that pretty much does the job (i.e gstreamer) 

Yes, this was one of the reasons why Tracker came to mind. The importance of the mission Tracker tries to cover is clear: it was the topic of Federico in GUADEC's closure and a big question mark in the user experience of real people nowadays. Federico was perhaps too taxative saying that "Tracker is not a solution". It is not in the way it is today and for the problem he exposed, but the base technology itself has no showstoppers to implement a solution. Or at least analyze the problem a bit further. 

Still, Tracker still needs lots of love - specially to make happy users with big memory cards and online content reachable from their mobile devices.

I have checked with Iván Frade, lead developer for Tracker in Maemo. He has a team of people well in sync with Jamie and the upstream project. There is more people in the GNOME context working on Tracker like... Philip? :) And others perhaps also in this list. Iván says that September is a good date to show many improvements and organize some objectives to be achieved during a week. 


> Things that come to mind are syncing and filling holes around 
> gsm telephony based stuff ?

This is indeed a very interesting idea from a pure GNOME Mobile point of view. What about asking any the LiMo partners to fund it and do it in another place/date?  :) 

Having a hackfest on GSM telephony stuff funded by Nokia around the Maemo Summit would send a big and totally wrong message not only to GNOME but to the whole mobile industry.

Quim