Fremantle maemo-select-menu-location change

While working on the maemo.org package interface, I noticed that quite a few package's developers didn't notice the changes in Fremantle regarding maemo-select-menu-location.

Fremantle changes the way applications are visible in the menu. There are no sub menus like "Extra" or "Utility" anymore. All installed 3rd party software will be visible under "Applications" by default.

This means that maemo-select-menu-location is obsolete and has been removed from the SDK. More info about the removal can be found in this bug.

There are currently about 60 package instances in Fremantle Extras-devel that depend or pre-depend on this obsolete package. These packages can not be promoted to Extras-testing until their author updates the package.

Daniel has started working on a Porting to Fremantle QA wiki page, which should point out some changes needed when porting to Fremantle. I hope this will help developers with the problems they encounter for now.

Introducing maemo.org packages

Starting with Fremantle, packages can now be managed by developers through the maemo.org packages interface. Community testers can help in the QA process by testing applications in the queue and giving thumbs up/down for a package.

At the same time we open the extras-testing and extras repositories for Fremantle for promotion through the interface.

The interface has the following features:

• Package search
• Package listings per repository
  
• Only allow maintainers to promote a package
• Request package maintainership
• Automatic package maintainership assignment on first upload of a package
• Automatic dependency tree checking
• QA queue for testing repository
• Promotion unlock to stable (Extras) repository based on karma score
• Leaving comments when you encountered problems with a package

We index all Fremantle Extras*, SDK and Nokia-binaries repositories, so we can check for availability of every dependency. A warning will be shown on a package information page, when there are missing dependencies. Package promotion will be blocked until the issue has been resolved.

At this moment the interface is in beta testing mode, so please be aware that there might be some rough edges. Promotion will happen manually for the first few promotions, so we can make sure that everything is working. Feel free to file bugs in bugzilla, if you encounter any.

Improvements will come in the next few weeks. More integration with the autobuilder is already coming next week.

In a later post, I will discuss the new promotion process for Fremantle a bit more in depth. This is still something that needs to be refined a bit.