Re: The Community

Benjamin Long wrote:
>
> Who wants to be a member of the Opie Community?

I was (in a very small way) for a while.

When I joined I spent quite a while putting a build environment together and getting used to it.
Once I got comfortable I came up with some ways of getting Opie rsynced to my iPAQ for testing (I
never managed to reproduce the bugs running it on x86). Not a great deal of time after that Opie
migrated into the OE tree and despite my best efforts I just ran out of steam trying to get an
efficient development methodology running. I just gave up in the end, which was about the same time
there was a huge drop off in commits as it just petered out. A lot of the core devs seemed to get
real jobs, or have exams, papers or similar and it just never picked back up again.

To be honest, while I loved Opie back then (on the odd occasions I could actually get pim to sync
with evolution - it *was* getting better) it's just stagnated. Lack of apps, huge difficulties
keeping xine updated for opieplayer2 (I ended up having a full debian build environment running on
my h5550 just to compile xine) and a general lack of time (for everyone it would seem) just seemed
to take the fun out of beating on Opie.

The constant flamewars in the team regarding incompatibility in the base libraries, pim schema and
other bits and pieces as compared to qtopia appeared to leave the whole community dazed, confused,
fragmented and floating without real direction.

I see phones as a strong future now (I gave in and bought a Palm.. at least it syncs), but I'm
really waiting to see what Palm comes up with at the end of the year with their 1st Linux offering
and how OpenMoko turns out before I lean in any direction.

I'd love to see some numbers as to how many people use Opie as a "daily driver" on their mobile
devices. I did for 2 years, but I just got sick of fighting with compatibility and unreliability
(which I tried to help with, but there are only so many hours in a day). I've still got my last good
build on my 3870, but that would be a late 2004 vintage now..

Anyway, my ramble over.. I'd love to be a part and I'd love to see it go somewhere.. I'm just not
visionary enough to plan the road, though I'd help build it and drive on it..

Brad

-- 
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams