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2010-04-29
, 06:43
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Posts: 1,671 |
Thanked: 11,478 times |
Joined on Jun 2008
@ Warsaw, Poland
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#42
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I'll start out by saying I was one of those n810 users who always ran latest Mer. I gave up when it became clear that the release of the n900 put a bullet in Mer's head.
Stskeeps, I'll address a few of your statements:
Yeah, especially when you start out tracking it for NITs, then you decide it's easier to port that to the SmartQ than it is to implement a settings panel that didn't accidentally reboot the device. The goalpost was always moving, sure, but the users weren't moving it, and Nokia wasn't moving it. But why not, right? The SmartDevices guys sent you a toy! I know n810 owners who were more excited about Mer than anything Nokia's doing, but their only source of information was the subject lines of emails you generated from IRC.
Hardly. If you had just finished up Mer for the n8x0, you could have saved a lot of time working on the Community SSU, because nobody would have cared -- Mer would have stepped in its place. And the fact that Nokia is switching to Qt doesn't mean GTK is going to be removed from the device. And furthermore, even if they had removed GTK, it's pretty damn trivial to repackage it with QtCurve and ship the damn thing as a support library.
Well, congrats. The many, many people eagerly exploring each testing release of Mer and looking forward to any kind of stable release are really glad you've got a job. Now would you mind updating the damn wiki entry to explain that Mer is dead?
I remember IRC discussions sounding exactly like this re: Mer. MeeGo is open, and as such I support it, but FOSS projects have a tendency to suffer from horrible scope creep. 3d drivers were a great distraction, but since nobody knew what Fremantle even looked like, it can hardly be argued that Mer needed 3d to survive. Distractions like that are what honestly killed Mer and I wonder what plan you guys have in place to keep it from happening to MeeGo. I'm sure Intel will ensure there's none of this port-to-every-platform wheelspinning; that's not their style.
But some of us have asked him once before what we could do, we were told to test Mer and report bugs, and then we got youtube videos of Mer booting on a SmartQ 5 and exhibiting the exact bugs we reported the month before.
Watch out for scope creep, guys, and keep an eye on the users. You'll be fine.
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2010-04-29
, 07:14
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Posts: 4,672 |
Thanked: 5,455 times |
Joined on Jul 2008
@ Springfield, MA, USA
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#43
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If you never get out into the wide world of Maemo, it seems awfully presumptuous of you to set out to grade someone performance based on such a thin slice of the community. Especially for the distmaster, whose work rarely directly affects self-described "end-users" (primarily because it is both platform-focused and long-term).
I wasn't supposed to code entire Mer entirely on my own. Did we as a community pull through? Yes, in many areas. Some, not. Did we learn things about the things
we dived into? A lot. So it goes.
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2010-04-29
, 08:03
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Posts: 1,671 |
Thanked: 11,478 times |
Joined on Jun 2008
@ Warsaw, Poland
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#44
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2010-04-29
, 08:23
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Posts: 4,672 |
Thanked: 5,455 times |
Joined on Jul 2008
@ Springfield, MA, USA
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#45
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I'll be in Germany fairly soon, so without mobile internet - been answering from my N900 all this time hence, I'll be absent for a number of hours, so don't treat my lack of replying as not wanting to discuss things
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2010-04-29
, 09:37
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Posts: 2,802 |
Thanked: 4,491 times |
Joined on Nov 2007
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#46
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The problem was that a lot of frustration exists/existed in the community regarding how things went with the N8x0s and Mer.
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2010-04-29
, 09:42
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Posts: 2,535 |
Thanked: 6,681 times |
Joined on Mar 2008
@ UK
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#47
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Hardly. If you had just finished up Mer for the n8x0, you could have saved a lot of time working on the Community SSU, because nobody would have cared -- Mer would have stepped in its place.
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2010-04-29
, 10:41
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Posts: 5,795 |
Thanked: 3,151 times |
Joined on Feb 2007
@ Agoura Hills Calif
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#48
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2010-04-29
, 11:11
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Posts: 1,513 |
Thanked: 2,248 times |
Joined on Mar 2006
@ US
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#49
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I'm surprised by the defensive tone of Stskeeps in his initial post. He is one of the best guys around, picking some of the hottest potatoes few others even dare to touch and being constant on pushing the things he feels important even if they don't bring flashy short term results.
The principles and work he lead at Mer are now embodied in the MeeGo project, and Carsten holds his tiny but noticeable percentage of merit. I see why this is not evident for most people today, but the day MeeGo ships a full stack developed openly and released soon & often using an open build system this will be just self-evident. That day creating MeeGo reconstructed images for different types of hardware will be simple and doable in a way no Mer developer or tester could imagine happening any time soon, even less thanks to an official project pushed by Nokia itself and others in that league.
About opening Nokia proprietary components, there is a lot of source code seeing the light and again Carsten's work can take its own percentage of merit. The driver for this opening is mostly MeeGo and from there anybody can pull and improve that code for that or other purposes.
And many more positive things. Dude, I'm still reading that first post with that tone and wondering what's going on. You are doing a lot of work that is interesting for several people. You're exposed, and in such situations you will always get congratulations and flames, with plenty of silent backing in between. Listen to criticism but don't be too obsessed about it, especially when your instincts and expertise tell you that you are doing quite well considering all the conditionants. You bet I have learned this not by reading it in a book.
Clear conclusion for Carsten and everybody: we are really happy funding his community work and will keep doing so without hesitation. He is working in pretty exciting stuff and it's everybody's interest to keep his motivations in good shape. If there are things you see that could be improved try asking him where could you help improving those things.
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2010-04-29
, 12:34
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Posts: 22 |
Thanked: 59 times |
Joined on Oct 2009
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#50
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The apps are the problem. You can see this on the Joggler with Mer 0.17 & OpenGL: you get a Hildon Desktop, you can install some apps, but if it's not ABI compatible with Maemo you're going to have a lot smaller pool of apps. Even if it did get large scale adoption, there're also API issues.
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Tags |
distmaster, review, stskeeps |
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Stskeeps, I'll address a few of your statements:
And now I'll respond to some of qgil's confusion:
I know that Stskeeps' work started as a labor of love. I'm happy that he's now making a living doing what he loves. I know that he's good at it, and will continue to be an irreplaceable asset to the Maemo and MeeGo communities.
But the users matter too. In FOSS, the users matter more than ever, because if they get upset enough they'll fork or leave. The Mer project was a failure in the eyes of the users, because the devs got distracted with port-the-alpha-everywhere syndrome, and because the users' expectations were not managed very well. The PR1.2 thread in the Fremantle forum is a perfect example of what happens when you ignore expectation management.
Watch out for scope creep, guys, and keep an eye on the users. You'll be fine.