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:

Maemo Summit 2008, Awesome!

The gathering of everybody Maemo has ended yesterday. 2 days filled with very interesting or even amazing meetings, talks and gossip. There was a very sharp contrast with the days before that at OSiM. I want to bet that the Maemo community was able to achieve more at the summit than all projects at OSiM together.

I've met a lot of people and it was very good to see the faces behind the email addresses or IRC nicks. We should not forget the benefit of meeting people in real life. Going to a bar or a restaurant together to have a nice dinner and have some German beers even adds more to this of course.

I'm glad that some of our rockstar hackers had a chance to meet the Nokia people involved in their favourite subjects. A lot of the explanations, about why something was decided this way, are better explained in a personal conversation.

Special props for lardman doing a talk on dsp programming in 30 minutes. The amount of information he managed to put in one talk was mind boggling.

As a maemo.org guy, I have had the opportunity to discuss a many plans and this will likely be more than enough work for me for the coming 10 years ;) Ed and Sasha(Wii tennis king!) had some valuable ideas for managing the repositories and reporting problems. I really hope we can implement those as soon as possible.

Next blog post will be about my talks and I will make the slides available there.

See you at a next meeting?

[Edit: Somehow this didn't get posted while I was at Tegel Airport yesterday]