Talk: Reducing number of external repositories

At the Maemo Summit, I had a talk about the Extras repositories and the plans for the future. The slides can be found on Slideshare: The huge number of external repositories makes it increasingly hard to have a flawless experience for the user when it comes to package selection and installation. The proplems we currently face is:

• Users are unable to easily find packages
• Users experience conflicts between repositories
• Unable to do quality testing on huge amount of repositories
• maemo.nokia.com – Is not able to hand pick packages from external repositories
  

One of the many things announced by Nokia was the creation of maemo.nokia.com, where the best community made applications will be featured. I guess there will be more posts from Nokia on that topic later.

Back to the external repositories problem:
We started to retrieve all source packages from all know repositories found on Gronmayer. These packages are fed to the autobuilder to see if they would build. The status page looks like this:

Our plan to reduce the number of external repositories:

• Build all source packages available in external repositories
• Show status of builds
  
• Try to discover missing sources (a lot of packages have no source available in the repo)
  
• Help developers to fix build problems
• Convince developers to move their packages into Extras
• Convince teams inside Nokia to do the same
  

We hope to get visible results for this effort. Help with this effort would be very appreciated. Please try to convince developers to move their packages into Extras, when they haven't done so yet.

Together with Dave Neary, I did another talk. This one was about the history of the Maemo community and the changes we went through in the last few months. The slides for this talk are also available: