[Fso] FSO Revitalizing Plan

[Lukas Maerdian]

Hi Mickey and welcome back! :)

2014-03-13 12:29 GMT+01:00 Dr. Michael Lauer <mickey at vanille.de>:
> So my plan to revitalize would be like that:
>
> 1.) Copy the relevant repositories to github.com as a synchronized clone of git.freesmartphone.org
> 2.) Make sure that what we have there builds against recent tools (autofoo, vala, 3rd-party dependencies)
> 3.) Apply outstanding patches.
> 4.) Wade through our spamfull trac, copy those tickets that are still relevant to github and shut down trac completely.
> 5.) Ponder about the current state of FSO on recent and future target devices, think about extensions and enhancements.
>
> What do you think?

Moving to github sounds good, as it will remove the need to maintain
the current trac instance and keep it clean of spam. Futheremore, more
(external) people might send in patches, as they are already used to
github and their easy fork & pull request integration.

As to the future road of FSO, I'd like to mention two ideas:
  1/ Sebastians current pet project the "Farewell Release for GTA02":
http://trac.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/Rock-solid%20Farewell%20Release%20%28GTA02%29
It might be nice to test and fix issues on the GTA02, to get it to a
usable state. Then we could create one last release for that plattform
and deprecate it afterwards, to concentrate on newer hardware.

  2/ New hardware: There still aren't a lot of open plattforms. The
GTA04 seems to be the "state of the art", regarding open hardware and
I don't know if it is worth to start reverse engineering again... The
problem is that the GTA04 is missing developers and users, still there
are some users of SHR/FSO on the GTA04 (
http://lists.goldelico.com/pipermail/gta04-owner/2014-March/005449.html
).
The Neo900 (neo900.org) looks like a nice target for the future (end
of this year), as it is based on the GTA04 and provides to possibility
to explore new technology, such as LTE. In Addition the N900/Neo900
has a very big and vital developer base and some people are keen to
port Maemo5/Fremantle to the Neo900. As the N900 modem abstraction
layer is proprietary and not useable for the Neo900, we could join
them and integrate fsogsmd with the Fremantle telephony apps, to get a
new FSO user (apart of SHR and some home-grown applications) and
active user- and developer base.
In addition we could revive the "Aurora-Project" to have a QT based,
feature phone like UI, which could function as a test bed for new FSO
functionallity and would integrate nicely with Maemo5/Fremantle.

I hope we can get some traction again!

BR,
  Lukas