Indeed, the latest modRana Maemo package is indeed pretty old, yet stable. I have wanted to update it for quite some time but never really get to it so far. The other issue is that I'm starting to wonder if updating it is actually a good idea. I don't really have a working Maemo SDK available locally and all the "recent" Maemo packages have been built by the Maemo autobuilder.

Given that by now likely all remaining Maemo/N900 users have Extras Devel enabled & the autobuilder packages (if successfully built) do directly to Extras devel, I'm kinda afraid a broken package would affect users, resulting in possibly lengthy back-and-forth by feeding the autobuilder and hoping a working package comes out.

If someone had the needed knowledge/tooling (I barely understood how Maemo packages are made back then, let alone now) and wanted to accept the challenge of updating the Maemo modRana package I (and surely any remaining users on Maemo) would be very happy.

Yes, that's basically the recommended way & should work in general. Just grab a release tarball/checkout a release tag and run modrana.py.

I don't really test this regularly (as I don't have any functional Python 2.5 environment outside of my trusty N900), so please let me know if you hit some issues.

In any case, it's good to know there are still people using modRana on the N900 - which is what, 10 years old about now ? Well, modRana itself will hit the 10 year mark in January of the next year. Crazy!

Is still don't have any immediate plans for dropping support for the N900, but there are a few things to consider:

• I've recently completely dropped the old abandoned Qt4/QML UI that just kinda worked on the N900 and did not provide much useful features & AFAIK no one really used it anyway
• I'm developing modRana on Fedora (and actually developing the Fedora installer as my day job ;-) ) and due to the upcoming upstream end of support for Python 2, Python 2 only packages are currently getting dropped left and right
• it is therefore not unthinkable that some of the Python 2 only dependencies of modRana (such as PyGTK for example) will get dropped from Fedora in the near future

Not having the Python 2 only deps (and possibly even Python 2 itself!) available in the distro I use would make harder assuring that the Python 2/GTK2 based GUI used on the N900 continues to be working.

So at some point in the future a time might come, where it would make more sense to maintain basically a separate branch for the N900, that would likely just get occasional fixes than much (if any) new development.

On the other hand this could help to make the "modern" codebase targeting Python 3 + Qt 5 cleaner by dropping all the hacks needed to support Python 2.5 - 3.7 at the same time + all the (rather messy code) that constitutes the GTK GUI.

And, potentially the "n900-branch" would no longer need to care about any of that newfangled Python >2, GTK >2 and GUI != GTK stuff, potentially making the life of anyone interested in stepping in and improving the N900 version easier.