Dave Neary schrieb: > Hi all, Hi! > This is a first draft of an agenda - I would really like feedback on > this, and I plan on hassling people about it over the next couple of > days to get you to do some homework before the event, if possible. Being well prepared will help, yes! > I'm phrasing the agenda in terms of objectives, rather than topics. > There's a reason for that - the topics can be quite loose and lend > themselves to talking without concrete results for a couple of hours, I > am hoping that by having solid objectives, and some meat on the bones, > that we can make some decent progress during the meeting. > > The one thing which risks being a little bit more vague is the > discussion on mid- and long-term goals. We can make these concrete, eg > "Create a virtualised sample GNOME Mobile platform people can play with, > and publicise and distribute it", or vague, eg "Ensure GNOME Mobile is > the platform of choice for mobile application writers". I would prefer > us to keep things as concrete as possible. Also, to help with over-run > prevention, I put this before lunch :) > > Feedback is greatly appreciated, on-list, especially of the "you're > smoking crack" variety if I'm on the wrong track. No no, very fine. What I am missing though, and this I cannot very well define myself, is more of the mobile or mobility aspect. I think Gnome/mobile can do much more than "just" tweaking things on the user interface side and very shallow waters underneath. I think there are also aspects that could/should be discussed within the Gnome/mobile context that reach far more below in the stack - as one example: power manegement. The upper layer stack elements can IMHO do a lot to at least help power management. One project in that direction that comes to my mind is OHM, which is a pretty nice mixture of upper and lower layer bound together using dbus. And this is important since, like in this example, power management on mobile devices comes very high in the priority list of features. Besides this I also see a lot of work in the areas of network management (connection and link management, parts being now done using network manager) which will get more and more important also for mobile devices. And on mobile devices this has the extra attribute that the mobility causes additional "troubles": Connection management must be seamless, with the least possible user interaction, roaming of technologies (GSM to WiFi to 3G, etc.). Also in this realm we find the issues of security, i.e. all the different authentication mechanisms that need to be taken care of for all the different technologies and networks (SIM card, WEP, WPA, etc...). And last but not least there are the "voice networks", i.e. telephony of all sorts for which we would like to have a common solution and API. From my recent experience telephony API (short TAPI) is one of the most discussed topics in all sorts of consortiums and standardisation groups - without much success, as far as I know. Even bigger institutions like LiMO, OHA, etc. have no big master plan for that, the LiPS TAPI was a neat approach but not exactly what we would like for Gnome/mobile I guess, etc. I think there was a workinggroup with Linux-Foundation and OMA (?) but also without much success. I think we can safely assume that the majority of the next generation mobile Linux devices will be sorts of mobile phones (if we do not take mobile devices like laptops/notebooks into account). And so we should also try to think about our plans with this perspective in mind: What can we do to help create good, stable, power saving and user friendly (hmm... this intuitive order I made here makes me wonder ;) devices? Hmm... does that help? The point I am trying to make mostly results from discussions with interested hardware manufacturers that showed their interest in Gnome/mobile and the questions they had. Maybe we could at least add a slot for everyone to talk a little about their experiences with "our customers", i.e. the ones actually making the devices we are talking about, their needs, requirements, fears, doubts, questions, problems, etc... I think the situation with mobile devices is a little different than with PCs. With PCs we do not necessarily have to care about the actual manufacturers. A PC is legacy and our software can be post production installed on them. So if you don't buy it from A you go to B. But with mobile devices you still buy devices+software in a bundle that you usually cannot avoid or replace the software later. So our goal should be to find manufacturers that *want* to use Gnome/mobile as their original software they ship on their devices. And so we have to care about them and their needs, problems, etc... > Cheers, > Dave. Cheers nils -- kernel concepts GbR Tel: +49-271-771091-12 Sieghuetter Hauptweg 48 Fax: +49-271-771091-19 D-57072 Siegen Mob: +49-176-21024535 --
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