Posted on 2009-10-25 07:42 UTC by Nathanael Anderson. Status: Under consideration, Categories: Programming.
Their are hundreds of applications in the Diablo(& prior) repositories of programs lots of people using on a fairly consistant basis.
The original authors/porters may or may not be interested (or be even around any more) in porting it to Fremantle. Their needs to be some way for developers who are willing to just port existing applications, and/or take ownership and revamp the interface to be consistant with the new UI.
Talk Thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=357594
Posted on 2009-10-25 07:53 UTC by Nathanael Anderson.
Users would create a list of applications that they use frequently so that a simple list was developed to understand which applications seems to popular and needs to be ported. Maybe we can start by pre-populate the list from top downloads from the downloads section?
Perferably this list will have some ability to have a thumbs up on the application so that applications could be voted upon to create a priority list.
A developer would volunteer to port and then take point on the application and attempt to contact the prior maintainer / porter and verify that the application has been abandoned using both the garage, talk, and .deb source maintainer email addresses. If the original maintainer/porter has not abandoned the project the developer could then update the line item signifying that the original maintainer is working on the project.
Posted on 2009-10-25 07:57 UTC by Nathanael Anderson.
A list could be generated from all packages in the repositories; then a automated email could be sent to all maintainers with a unique url that signifies (yes/no) that they are planning on porting it to fremantle. The list of projects that comes back with "no" gets put to the top of the list.
A un-responding author would have to be contacted by a developer wanting to port the project, or a week later maybe all un-responding gets another email. And then any "unresponding" will be marked the project is abandoned and uncontactable.
Posted on 2009-10-25 08:23 UTC by Josef Assad.
The idea looks to me to have two distinct elements. Figuring out what people use (where the need is) and then figuring out what there is that people use that needs work.
I like reuse. I suggest popcon for the first element and replicating as much as possible from Debian's WNPP for the second. The first should generate a list indicating what is most used and the second would crowdsource the ability to identify where work is needed.
The way popcon could be used is to run it extensively against Fremantle users and against Diablo or Mer and then diffing. That should give us a clear indication of what is popular in Maemo but not available (yet) in Fremantle.
Debian's WNPP is a good choice for Maemo as the semantics and procedures are familiar and - being well established - quite thorough and well thought out.
Caveat: As the N900 becomes more generally available I expect to see a lot of packages organically being ported which might obviate the need for this kind of solution.
