Re: Reminder: SFO call for action - aka questionnaire

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri <barbieri profusion mobi>]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 7:51 AM, Nils
Faerber<nils faerber kernelconcepts de> wrote:
> As a reminder: The questionnaire's due date is in less than a week from
> now. So far not all subscribers have replied.

Sorry, being busy these last days, but here it is:
> About you:
> 1. Please describe your background a little bit, i.e. what are you
> working on that made you interested in Gnome/mobile? If it helps us
> understand your background, who are you working for?

Doing Linux development since 1999, I started doing TCL/TK, then GTK1,
then Qt, then GTK2. I always had interest in mobile, or more
specifically things that I was able to use on my day to day tasks.
When the first hackable devices shown, I started to hack them, later
on joining INdT (Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia, Brazil) to work on
Maemo.


> When you first heard of Gnome/mobile:
> 2. What did you think it to be? Please be as frank as possible - what
> were your really *first* thoughts?

It would provide a set of applications and try to push desktop
technologies to think about mobile problems (touchscreen, battery,
etc).


> 3. What did you expect from it? What did you hope to see as a result
> from it?

I expected the set of applications and the push of desktop
technologies to think about mobile problems.

As result I was bit disapointed, although we had things like GPE, it
was never embraced officially and made it usable. So far Linux mobile
systems provide the worst PIM experience ever :-(    On the mobile
problems, I was disappointed as well, specially on GTK front where we
could have improved it but we did not and at the end we had Hildon to
deal with. IMHO Hildon should be part of GTK, maybe even a compile
time switch, but not another library.


> 4. Why did you join the group? Do you feel like a "member" at all? If
> not, why not?

I joined the list to keep myself informed, so I feel more like an
observer. These days I don't have the time to actively help the group,
sorry :-(


> 5. Did it match your expectations? If not, why? If yes, how?

No, it did not. I miss software actions in this group. While we see
talks (not even much of it lately), we don't see resulting code, which
is bad.


> 6. Is there something like a top-three of most important goals that you
> (personally, not thinking of the group as a whole) would like to see
> addressed by Gnome/mobile? (Three would be great, one is enough too)

just 2, but important:

1 - Provide a good set of applications for mobile systems that include
at least PIM, maps/gps and browser. These do not need to be enforced,
but need to be provided.
2 - Push desktop technologies to care more about mobile problems.
Being finger friendly, memory consumption, optimized rendering for 16
bit-per-pixel depth screens and all


> And today:
> 7. How do you perceive Gnome/mobile today? What is missing? What is too
> much? What is / could be Gnome/mobile's first priority goal? And second?

Today I perceive it as a discussion group where not much discussion happens.

Software is really missing. Participating into Gnome discussions to
weight mobile systems is also missing.

The goals should be:
  - write/fix/improve code to be usable on mobile systems.
  - participate into discussions, taking problems perceived on first
step to have a better mobile experience.

I really think that not doing the mobile software project is really
bad because we miss the real problems. When you try to provide a
competitive stack of software you'll face problems that are hard to
solve without cooperation with other components, and that is the
second goal.

This happened in kernel land some years ago. Linux would mostly work
on embedded systems, but just after people started to really do work
to make it excellent they faced problems that needed cooperation from
all subsystems.


> Technically:
> 8. What do you think should qualify a platform for being a Gnome/mobile
> platform? A specific set of components used? If yes, which components?

I think this is not a good way to put it. Gnome mobile should provide
a good set of applications and vendors should cherry pick what they
want.

So it's not "qualifying platforms being a Gnome/mobile" but providing
an usable set for platforms.


> 9. Or should there be a formal qualification process? If yes, what would
> be your idea about it? If not, why not?

no.


> 10. What should be the technology goals of Gnome/mobile? Like creating a
> toolbox rather than a product? Or collaboration and information
> infrastructure rather than a development project?

I listed these above.


> Organisation:
> 11. At the moment the Gnome/mobile group is a pretty loose group,
> everyone interested is welcome and can at once participate. Would you
> like to see this a little more formally structured? Like a formal
> membership, application process, levels of membership, voting processes,
> etc.? Or would like to see it grow as is, a group connected by ideas and
> consensus rather than rules? Other ideas?

the less formal, the better. We lack results and not processes.


> Comments:
> 11. Anything else? Did we forget something? Any additional comments?
> Thoughts?

Thanks Nils for doing this questionnaire, this is important to move forward.

Regards,

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
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Skype: gsbarbieri
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