Howdy, dear reader!
It's been a while on this blog, mainly due to the fact that many short status updates are better twittered than blogged. Then again, as promised / threatened in last year's installment of this column, I had to spend most of the time this year with iOS development, rather than with FOSS -- and it doesn't look like this will change much (you know, food and things...). Still I do care a lot about projects like OpenEmbedded, Vala, freesmartphone.org, and the like, so here's what has been going on this year:
OE moved along quite well this year. I did not have much time for it -- other than taking care about a couple of Vala and FSO recipes -- but I'm especially pleased that the community finally embraced major clean up. Thanks to Frans, Richard, and all others involved, OE is improving heavily -- although it wasn't easy: Over the last couple of years, the OE core contributors developed a resistance against any changes affecting more than a handfull of recipes, however in order to make OE handle even more contributors and various use cases, we had to do some substantial cleanups. This will reduce maintenance and improve the overall quality of recipes in OE, which is the #1 complaint I hear.
During the first half of the year, Vala went through some extremely tiring phases of non-activity, which improved vastly when its main developers opened up a bit, i.e. giving more developers access to the tree, adding branches, etc. There have been many changes in the Dova profile, but also the GLib profile has seen an incredible amount of work, bugfixes, some new features, and more.
The pace of changes that affect basic things had also impact on my vala-book plans; apart from a severe lack of time on my side, I think it's better to wait until Vala is closer to 1.0. Otherwise I risk describing a moving target, which -- considering the time I have to work on that project -- would effectively kill it. That said, it's great to see that Vala is getting better every day and gains more and more popularity from all kinds of developers.
The progress on freesmartphone.org is two-fold; on one hand, we have seen quite a nice amount of work to support more devices. On the other hand though, in contrast to all the work I did in 2009, there has been a severe lack of development of the core in 2010. This I plan to change as soon as possible. For 2011, I see myself continuing to develop FSO in the following three dimensions; internal, external, and integration.
All this means that I will not be working much on the actual ports, but rather use my -- very limited, did I say that yet? -- time to drive the core forwards. I still believe that we will have full FOSS phones -- other than the Openmoko devices -- soon. Please help to make this dream a reality. (And no, please don't talk to me about Android...)
Cheers,
:M: