screenlets-dev team mailing list archive

[boamaod@xxxxxxxxx]

Hello again,

After just changing a couple of messages with Julien and Rico, I realise 
that I don't really know what do other people on the project think about 
the project or about free software in general. It could be that our 
conceptions about all this are quite different and this could be a 
reason why we think differently about Screenlets.

I am really for the freedom and active participation of community and I 
think Screenlets should be a project in the same spirit. For my mind, 
Screenlets should be mainly a framework offered for users for running, 
creating and publishing Screenlets and not so much a ready collection of 
Screenlets. There are also practical reasons for this: Screenlets' 
project itself cannot create and maintain a selection of Screenlets good 
enough and up do date. I think this should be left to community.

The present way of publishing Screenlets as archived files on the web is 
rather dirty way of publishing them. It makes publishing of Screenlets 
episodic (no automatic updates) and not safe (no dependencies checking). 
It's not a preferred way of installing software on a Debian-based 
system. Of course a screenlet deloper can decide to publish a Screenlet 
on a PPA, but this is not encouraged in any way and would be considered 
rather weird (for example, I think there is now just one (!) Screenlet 
published in Ubuntu "universe" repositories: monajat-screenlet).

I think it's time to start encouraging it.

First of all, we should publish all the Screenlets now in the official 
package individually on a PPA. And for the next step, we should be 
agreeing and willing to publish on our PPA any Screenlet that "works". 
There should be an easy procedure for that. This would make user 
Screenlets and "official" Screenlets equal by status and this is 
definitely good for the motivation of the community to develop and 
publish Screenlets. Only way the official ones would distinguish, is 
that we also offer a collection of the best of the best available in our 
PPA as a basic recommendation (which is installed together with the 
Screenlets core package).

Installing Screenlets from PPA would add more trust to Screenlets and 
would make installing third party Screenlets available for either 
suspicious users (PPA is a legitimate source of installing software, 
much more legitimate than installing archives randomly downloaded from 
the WWW) or users without skills needed to search, choose, download and 
install Screenlets from the WWW (but what every user learns first on 
Linux system is how to install software from package manager).

I must admint, that I'm quite eager to make it possible for the 
community. So I think we have to implement some way of installing 
individual Screenlets from PPA. So let's ask, what is the best way to do it!

By now I think I prefer the second of the options I envisaged in my last 
reply to Julien: To get rid of real Screenlet packs and replace them 
with metapackages, which bind together individual Screenlets as Debian 
packages. This would be the most natural way to do it on a Debian-based 
system and everything would find its solution logically (no problems 
with separate installation directories for Screenlets, Screenlet packs, 
core Screenlets etc).

I stress that this is not just adding a new feature to Screenlets. This 
is directly addressing the present problem of Screenlets. As you are 
well aware of, the present problem is that Screenlets have not been 
updated for more than two years and that the "official" pack of 
Screenlets is really outdated and not usable for a general public. Can 
you say that you are completely sure these problems will be solved in 
the future, if the organization of the project remains the same? 
Standing before the fact, that there just now was (or still is, to be 
correct) a two years stall in the project?

I think these problems would be partly solved by giving users 
straightforward possibility to commit any Screenlet easily to the PPA, 
where other users can easily install them. This way it's not only the 
core developer who holds a responsibility and has means to update an 
"official" Screenlet, if it's outdated, but it's pushed a bit more on 
the shoulders of users.

I'm sure users can do much of it instead of the core developers and core 
developers will have more time to fix the problems in the core 
Screenlets package itself. There will be no pressing need to make a big 
roadmap to next release with the responsibility to fix and guarantee the 
good condition for every individual Screenlet in the core package. The 
core developer will just sort out from the metapackage the Screenlets 
that do not work well, and update only the ones he thinks are really 
needed to update. It will be much easier and less time-consuming to 
publish maintenance releases for Screenlets core package and the 
probability of two year break between releases will be much lower.

Of course even now, users can fix the core Screenlets, and they do it 
quite a lot on Gnome-look.org, but these updates are really hard to 
find, episodic by nature and installing them is wearisome. I hope you 
see, that publishing these updates in the PPA beside "official" 
Screenlets would make things completely different. Updates by users 
would be instantly available to the community, even without the need to 
go searching for them on Gnome-look.org or some other place.

This change will also address the the problem which Julien expressed by 
the words "especially the number is important". It wouldn't be so 
important anymore to offer a large number of Screenlets as an "official" 
Screenlets pack, because lot of the updates to individual Screenlets 
would be done by users (and if users don't fix a particular Screenlet, 
they probably don't need it so much).

When I read Rico saying that he has two month "holiday" coming (well, 
I've done that myself and it will be fun experience for sure, but not 
really a free time, trust me, Rico!) and we should make a roadmap to 
"rock-solid 0.2" release without any feature changes, I'm really afraid 
that will be an overkill, if it is meant to be be done the way it has 
been done until now (updating all the individual Screenlets and 
maintaining them). I'm afraid that the community won't get a new 
Screenlets this way or if they get it, there will be stoppage of the 
project again, after the "rock-solid 0.2" is reached.

So my proposal is that we go like this:

1) We start applying the patches to the Screenlets core.
2) We remove all the individual Screenlets from core.
3) We add them to a special source branch for all individual Screenlets.
4) We create a special team (or take over some of the existing teams) 
for updating individual Screenlets (and accept all people willing to be 
members).
5) We create a metapackage to bind couple of really basic and 
well-functioning Screenlets (by now I propose just Calc, Clock, Flower, 
Notes, Slideshow and Trash for the beginning, because I have updated and 
checked these out myself; we can add anything later).
4) We create a PPA for Screenlets.
6) We publish all individual Screenlets on the PPA as Debian packages.
5) We publish the first updated version of new Screenlets core on the 
PPA (with the metapackage mentioned above in "recommends").

Notice that this doesn't need any extra features to be added to 
Screenlets core. It's just a matter of packaging. All individual 
Screenlets will be still under /usr/share/screenlets and ~/.screenlets 
so everything is exactly the same. Everything will just work. We don't 
even need to test it too much either because we are relying on Debian 
package managment system to do all the hard work.

Just like that.

a) The next step would be to update Screenlets documentation about the 
new way of packaging and announce that any Screenlet is welcome to be 
included in the individual Screenlets branch, therefore in PPA (and give 
instructions for that). We offer also a policy for modifications of 
Screenlets.

b) Then we should merge individual Screenlets branch with Universal 
Applets extras, since it contains variety of updated Screenlets easily 
modifiable to work with standard Screenlets package (I have done this 
modification already in my Stayin' Alive project).

c) After that I will add some of my own Screenlets I have 
created/updated (GoogleCalendar, Slideshow, Twitter, Notes, 
FreemeteoWeather) in the individual Screenlets branch and PPA. I will 
publish them also on Gnome-look.org, making a note that these Screenlets 
as well as all the official Screenlets are also available as Debian 
packages on the Screenlets PPA (and that individual Screenlets can be 
added there). I will put the apturl for my packages as well. This will 
get us some first feedback and users to test out the new PPA style 
packaging and help to start updating individual Screenlets.

d) Next, if we think that Screenlets core is "rock-solid" enough, we 
will publish it as well on Gnome-look.org and GTK-apps.org explicitly as 
an official new version of Screenlets. This will give a lot of users and 
lot of feedback for testing, maybe also helping hands to develop Screenlets.

Somewhere in this point would be to start to merge Screenlets with 
Universal Applets core, if that's possible.

Now, I don't know what will be the fate of the individual Screenlets as 
Debian packages. I mean I'm not sure if they can be added to Ubuntu 
repositories for the official release (in Natty Narwhal?), but I suppose 
that the "core" ones can be added without problems, am I right Julien? 
About rest of them, they will have to be downloaded from PPA. So 
probably we should create an easy way for users to add this PPA to their 
systems by just clicking a button in Screenlets Manager.

I'm not also really sure if there should be different PPAs for 
Screenlets core and individual Screenlets. If users want to have a 
"official Ubuntu version" of Screenlets core and still use the variety 
of individual Screenlet packages from PPA, this would be nice thing to 
have. But maybe it's too much customisation.

What we could also do, is to download all the available Screenlets from 
Gnome-look.org (and Screenlets.org) by means of a download script and 
create automatically Debian packages from all of them and add these to 
the PPA. I think this should be just a one-time import, but it's worth 
thinking about. If you prefer, these could be imported into a separate PPA.

Please, tell me how do you feel about this plan or propose something 
else. You see I have code burning in my hands, because I think I have a 
working and updated version of Screenlets and I want to publish it to 
the community. I'd really prefer that the Screenlets project won't split 
into some experimental branch and a main branch.

Sincerely "etc"
Guido Tabbernuk