Progress of Maemo Port

This is mostly a inquiry toward Renato, but it certainly can be
generalized. As you might know, AbiWord recently received a nice Maemo
4.0 patch, so that in theory we can run on the latest N810/N800 software
(IT OS2008). In the bug report, it also said that we have our 2007
compatability too.

My questions:
1. Building/Packaging - There is maemo debian packaging in the source
tree, but it's pretty outdated. I've tried to build using it (see
http://cleardefinition.com/page/Build_AbiWord_for_Maemo/ ) - the key is
the ln -s step. This could use some TLC, preferably before 2.6.0 so
that the internettablettalk.com community doesn't have my head for not
shipping a Maemo binary :) IMHO, it is preferable to keep this
specialized packaging in the AbiWord tree, so that it can be maintained
along with the rest - it's an entirely different platform/port and not
just another distro.

In an ideal world, I'd love to see step by step instructions (like my
Windows build instructions) that work in the Maemo SDK VM
http://maemovmware.garage.maemo.org/ to build an entire Maemo package
set. (This may include dependencies, as needed - those instructions
could probably go upstream, but stored in some easily-accessible place:
see all my dependency instructions on cleardefinition.com )

(PS - For some reason my Maemo VM can't connect to the Internet, so that
increases the burden of entry for me to try another [blind] build.
Others have presumably gotten it to build before, and I'd like to tap
into that knowledge base if possible.)

2. Compatability - If we lost 2006 compatibility with the latest patch,
is there something we can do (partial revert/merge?) to regain it?
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the 770 that should prevent our
operation on it, and I'd really like to see this support return.

I really hope we are 2007 compatible (with just a rebuild) - separate
instructions if needed to turn on or detect "2007 build" (Maemo 3.2)
mode would be good to have. The 770 can run an unsupported 2007, so
this might be a (poor) fallback compatibility there.

3. Shipping/installation - at the moment, we have a small apt repository
with some binary packages for the ARM platform. I'd like to see
official binary packages for ARM and x86 Scratchbox, as well as source
packages. In a really, really good world, we'd push those to Maemo
Extras - the repository pre-loaded on the devices (just needs to be
enabled) that is trying to reduce the havoc surrounding the multiplicity
of repositories currently available. It would vastly broaden our reach.

So, what do folks think?

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
www.cleardefinition.com