keesj

This post is about downloads.maemo.org

I have been programming Java for the last 8 years. The Java community is very well educated in terms of design patterns, documentation and testing. Almost every project I started used a different, newer technology and I have learned an awful lot of different development techniques. As developer it is very nice to work with new technology. It is a real shame that you don't know the anti-patterns until your in the middle of the project, and that is the moment where you realize that the next project I will run will use a different technology. There are only two components I really used a lot in the past years, one is the spring framework and the other is MMBase. The spring framework really is a brilliant piece of software I wish I would have created. For MMBase it is a different story, it is a ugly piece of software that gets the jobs done and that I partially created :p . MMBase is full of weirdness and hacks. Still what those have in common is that they get the job done.

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While the spring project is at brilliant design I have not been able to contribute to that project. Perhaps I am just not such a good programmer. Doing things in the right way and the right mind is very hard.

For the MMBase project I have been a good contributor[tm] and MMBase has become a piece of me.

I guess that unless you are a really brilliant programmer you should try to get the job done as good as necessary but not better. Don't over design and make sure people can contribute.

So what does this all have to do with maemo?
I guess that we have a problem with downloads.maemo.org it is over designed and it is hard to contribute. Yes, it is the right design to have people download install files. Yes there should not be to much repositories. But to do the right thing in such a setup is almost impossible

To make this really work you should provide 8 binaries (2.0 + 2.1 + 2.2 + 3.0) * (armel + i386) and a source debian file.
To make this work you need a debian system in order to sign the packages
To make this work you need to test this on the different devices with different versions

I have not been able to install maemo-mapper on it2007 using the .install and the simplest
way I found to install it was to port it to mud , upgrade it to sqlite3 , create a .deb package and install it on my device

Can you imagine a few way's to simplify the downloads.maemo.org proccess and help people contribute?

The pragmatic programmer

02/18/07

10:07:43 am The pragmatic programmer

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