Planet maemo: category "feed:0ffd60645267b49419c542bd55f461df"

When the Council was first formed, one of the things we decided we were going to do was aggregate community activity to this blog. This was to reduce the workload for people who wanted to track what the community was up to, but didn't have the time to monitor every single channel for updates (the list of which is rather sizable, including Internet Tablet Talk, the mailing lists, #maemo, Planet, the wiki, Bugzilla, Jaiku, and others). Unfortunately, due partially to lack of a structured plan and partially to some lazy fellow council members who I wont name :P, this "aggregation" has been limited to posts from me about things I happen to be interested in (or think need highlighting). Which doesn't include those things that I'm not interested in, or fail my entirely arbitrary relevance test. ;)

Today I'd like to announce the beginning of Canola issue tracking on the maemo.org Bugzilla. This marks the beginning of community application tracking in our Bugzilla, and another milestone in maemo.org's transition into a true community website.

Canola's existing tracker on Garage is now closed (anybody familiar with Garage's tracker will know exactly how sweet a thing that is ;)), any remaining valid issues will be migrated to Bugzilla, and the rest of the issues will be closed.

This is only the first step in tracking 3rd-party applications in Bugzilla, as tracking for more than just a few applications will be dependent on significant software upgrades, so we're starting with a small pilot-program with some high-profile applications that are most likely to benefit from quality bug tracking.

Big thanks to Andre and Karsten (our bugmasters) for facilitating this change, and to the Canola team (particularly Marcelo Oliveira and my fellow Council member Eduardo Lima) who worked so hard to get Canola open-sourced (which was really what finally made this happen). The rest of you can show your appreciation by filing some bugs! ;)

Since a lot of you will be changing your packaging once the new categories are added to the Application Manager (which we are still missing a few translations!), now seems like a good time to discuss some of the packaging features many of you are missing out on.

Some of you may recall my last post where I talked about the new package categories for Diablo. In order to implement these new categories, a few changes need to be made to the Application Manager. In order for Nokia to ship these changes, translations of the categories need to be provided for all of Nokia's supported languages. The appropriate steps have been taken internally to begin translation of the new strings, but this process takes time which may unacceptably delay the shipment of the new Application Manager code.

Fortunately the community can help out here by translating the list of categories. Anybody interested and able should see the wiki page and fill in any missing languages. Once these translations are completed, hopefully the updated Application Manager can be shipped in one of the next few SSU releases, and packagers and users will start benefiting from the new categories.

In an effort to improve packager compliance and user experience in the Application Manager, the list of valid package categories for Diablo has been changed. The new list should better cover the different sorts of applications available on the platform:

Just a heads up, there are only 6 days remaining until the Midgard wiki dies for good, so if there are any other pages you'd like to have moved or redirected, please list them. Otherwise, they'll all be gone after November 4th, 2008.

Harassment of package maintainers is still ongoing, but the responses so far have been quite good (no negative responses, yet, but more than a few non-responders which could be taken a few ways). A few packages have already been updated with section fixes, and I even managed to get a positive response from Boingo (thanks Marcell)!

I haven't been very productive lately. My two projects are blocked by missing people (karsten and jott, where are you hiding?). Need to harass the rest of the Council about blogging and finishing up everything on our wiki page, but I'm sure they're busy (as am I).

During the 100 Days brainstorm, two of the biggest issues discussed were cleaning up the maemo.org content to remove cruft and keep everything high-quality, and redesigning the look and layout of the site to be lightweight, attractive and usable.

The design and layout discussion is ongoing, but we've already seen mockups from Bundyo and fms, and Quim has asked the INdT folks responsible for the new logo to try their hand at a design, too.

Before we tackle design issues, the first step is to start cleaning up existing content. Dave has outlined most of the types of use-cases that the content should cater to. So we need to figure out any additional use-cases, and get down to setting up the site to be usable for all of them.

To help kick off the discussion (and since it worked so well for Bugzilla), we're holding an IRC meeting on Freenode in #maemo-meeting on Saturday this week at 19:00 UTC. Be there!