Re: Hildon on MeeGo

[Cornelius Hald <hald icandy de>]

Hi Stormy,

Stormy Peters wrote:
> Hi Cornelius,
>
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Cornelius Hald <hald icandy de 
> <mailto:hald icandy de>> wrote:
>
>
>     It looks like that date was postponed, but on June 6th, Stormy wrote
>     that in the coming week she will "Get out board approved proposal for
>     using the Nokia money for GNOME Mobile"[1]. That week is over, so does
>     anyone know this proposal? Is there a place where I can read
>     logs/minutes of that meeting?
>
> The minutes from the board meeting are published on the wiki and the 
> Foundation List.

Thank you. I´ve found them now here[1].

> We agreed to some combination of hackfests, documentation and getting a 
> few good sample applications ported but we decided to wait until we had 
> a chance to have some conversations at LinuxTag.

I realize that I´m too late for this discussion, so I don´t really have 
to right to judge it now. Still I feel like I should put my thoughts out 
here. Because I really disagree with this plan. Sorry :(

> We have a proposal now that is a plan to get to a plan. The idea is to 
> make our developer tools and environment better so that developers want 
> to write GNOME apps for Maemo/MeeGo. Roughly it includes:

IMO we don´t need to encourage developers to write GNOME apps for 
Maemo/MeeGo. There are already many highly motivated people and a lot of 
applications. There are currently over 300 rock solid and well tested 
applications in Maemo´s stable repository[1]. Most of them are based on 
GTK+/Hildon. There are many more being developed currently. All of them 
open-source applications BTW.

> * A survey about the current state of our tools.

I don´t think this is needed. What does it help? Tools can always be 
better, no need to ask people about it.

> * Discussions at GUADEC.

Sure, why not.

> * Improvements to our current development environment.
> * Partnering with developer tools groups.
> * Improving developer documentation, ncluding websites, videos and 
> tutorials. 

So this is mainly about the development enviroment, docs, etc.
Well, I think, the environment is fine already. 300 existing 
applications prove that. It´s not programmers heaven, but ok - it never 
is. It´s probably important to further improve the situation, but there 
are more important things to do right now.

> * Holding hackfests where appropriate to improve these things. 

Sure. If appropriate.

> * Make sure there are a few key apps to show off.

They are already there [1].

As I see it the complete focus in on the development environment, docs, 
etc. What is completely missing is:

*Get GTK+ and Hildon running on MeeGo as good as possible*

If we don´t have GTK+/Hildon on MeeGo, we don´t need better development 
tools. We also don´t need better documentation. This should be the 
single most important point of the proposal.

It is something that should be started right now. And it should be 
communicated to the current Maemo developers. There should be a 
statement like "GTK+/Hildon will be supported on MeeGo as a full 
alternative to Qt". Otherwise the current Maemo developers will start 
using Qt or simply go away.

> What this is really missing is someone in this space, with a vested 
> interest in this space, with knowledge of the space to help drive and 
> lead this effort. 

Totally agreed.

> It worries me a lot that nobody has stepped forward to help. While I can 
> help push things forward, I do not think I am the right person to lead it. 

It worries me too, but if we have no one volunteering for this jobs, 
maybe the/some money should be used to buy this leader. I think it would 
be better spent that way than doing some hackfests. Hackfests are fun, 
but for such a time consuming task it´s the wrong thing to do.

Anyways, as I said, I arrived late at the party, so I´ll have to live 
with it´s outcome. Still I hope you´ll take my points into consideration.

Thanks!
Conny

[1] http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/
[2] http://maemo.org/downloads/list/Maemo5/all/