Hi there! ABSTRACT I think a new showroom for community created application is needed to boost the development and help users to get to know new apps easily. Now we have opkg.org to show & distribute the apps created by the community for Freerunner.
SETUP opkg.org has allowed us to easily see what apps are new in the community, the comment system has alowed us to get in touch with the developer/packager and we've seen nice screeshots there to encourage us to try apps. Also the release of opkg.org repository was great! But: opkg.org is has many outdated and broken packages with missing dependencies opkg.org doesn't separate packages for different distributions opkg.org doesn't share the source codes as per GPL opkg.org code can be changed only by the main developer opkg.org developer doesn't seem to be working on it any more (since April) opkg.org developer is not an easy fish to catch Now have a look at these: http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3gs/app-store.html http://www.android.com/market/ https://store.ovi.com/?lid=storeherotxt&cid=ovistore-fw-ilc-body-acq-na-ovicom-g0-na-2&lang=fi-FI http://getdeb.net/ http://maemo.org/downloads/OS2008/ They all a) show a screenshot b) allow a more or less easy installation of the selected app For Freerunner, we need something like this to do the trick. Being easily able to promote applications will inspire devels to write apps which the makes the users and other devels more satisfied with Freerunner and inspire more developers to participate. Repositories are nice but there needs to be a way for people to know what apps are now in. Ubuntu with ~30 000 packages doesn't inspire me to try even a music player without comments from others and a screenshot. METHODS Landing to the site would let you select your preferred distribution. SHR, OM2009, Debian, OpenWRT, ..? - possibly include also stable/testing/unstable versions. After this you would only see the apps that have been marked as tested on that distribution. Installation would be done from a repository - the best would be to use the ~official repositories for each distribution (openembedded, openmoko, shr, fso-pkg/deb etc) OR we build a new repository only for apps presented in the showroom, a different one for each distribution. And if there is a repository, also the source code needs to be there (GPL..) Then next level would be to create a gui for Freerunner to show the screenshots and allow easy installation, something like apturl. Maybe this functionality could be built on top of one of the existing graphical package managers? And last but not least, allow more people than only one to have access on the site code.. I'm sure there are some people in the community who feel like doing something to support the community but don't have the skills to hack the kernel: this is an opportunity for all PHP/Django/Web gurus to contribute. Does anyone know if software enabling this exists? Could eg. Launchpad be used? DISCUSSION There's nothing new here: all this was suggested already 10 months ago when opkg.org was announced, see http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2008-October/thread.html#33132 Separation for each distribution is naturally required: all packages created for SHR just won't work on OM2009 as the lib versions are not the same etc, and then we have the debian-based distributions too and so on.. Problem with packages in opkg.org and packages in random websites (as well as some packages in the repositories) is that if they use lib X and lib X version is updated, the app Y stops working without the author/maintainer knowing about it until weeks later, or maybe the kernel paths change again. So next time they decide to include the whole lib X in their app just to be sure it doesn't happen again. The lack of coordination and communication results broken and/or bloated software. So I'd prefer using the existing/official repositories and try to find maintainers, not start a new fragmented repository for each distribution We need package maintainers who make sure a new nice community-written app will be added to the official repositories of distributions, I think it's not good to expect the author can create packages for say 5 distributions. CONCLUSION What do you think? r _______________________________________________ Openmoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community