well i guess this thread will denigrate into people agreeing to dissagree but hey thats good too...the free exchange of ideas will lock into someones head and well...help make some good changes

Lets just hope that we get some kind of download section back here.

The other Themes are under development.

After posting them some where on some site, their developers desperately look for discussion between themselves and the users.

Please -- someone propose a solution where users can provide direct feedback to developers and developers can offer help and talk directly to the user community!

uhh i think we are trying.....the problem here is a devoloper puts something out...everyone rushes to try it...people like who dont have the full 100 % understanding of what said program can do or how to make it work gets frustrated then sulks off...or gets told to search for there answers

I know alot of people hate wiki's if someone had a problem and found out how to fix it then it got put on the wiki it would be easy to find and point people to. (Gets ready to be flammed for bringing up wiki)

/me blasts andrewfblack with liquid N2
(That's the opposite of a flame, in case anyone didn't get it.)

Touché - however no-one's suggesting that there shouldn't be a better communication mechanism between users & developers. Some projects have mailing lists and fora (some of which are hosted on garage, but that's not important right now), for things like themes such overheads are probably overkill (but there'll come a time when a theme author wishes he had version control).

If ITT can provide some kind of automated service for that, all's the better. As long as it doesn't mean as an application developer: 1) duplicating content I've already put in the de facto place, 2) following disparate threads and comments elsewhere when my project might have somewhere more specific.

If we're talking about optional developer tooling, that's great - but that's not what Reggie originally announced.

BTW I did put some info in the wiki today.

Er... let's see.

The constructive proposal to move forward:

- Can you please create a wiki page listing the use cases you want to satisfy? I bet we can accomplish all of them in a sensible way, making users and developers happy without doubling work and tasks at ITT and maemo.org. Please detail all the requirements you would need from maemo.org, so we know exactly what do we have and what is missing.

The little details:

- Canola has been presented as a good case for this software service in ITT. Well, http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/canola2/ is a good example of an application listed in maemo downloads that is being updated regularly as new releases are produced. So what? Syndicating the information generated in maemo downloads ITT would have just the same thing and the (really busy) Canola developers could keep the current routine instead of having to double effort every time they have a new release (and they do many before reaching the desired final version).

- There are themes in maemo downloads i.e. http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/NuvoPearl/

- There are not NumptyPhysics levels to downloads. By the way, I couldn't find them either at http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/ . Do they exist independently from the application? Can a user save download and add them separately? Is anything stopping anybody from uploading these levels in maemo downloads now, and even suggesting a specific space for them?

- But what is most important, if you find other things missing... did you ever ask for them? Someone asked for PC downloads and now there is http://maemo.org/downloads/PC/ . I don't see why anything useful couldn't be implemented, if feasible.

- Currently maemo.org works like this: Nokia is funding some guys to gather what is relevant for the community and do it. Or specify it if it's too big, so we can plan a budget for that. Nokia is happy when the maemo community is happy. Many people in this thread have said "talk to X-Fade" aka Niels Breet. He is the webmaster and he is the one pushing the agenda of things to be done. He is also the developer of the maemo downloads, so he knows the thing and what else could do. Nobody at Nokia s bloking him or anybody else from implementing improvements and receiving new feature requests.

- Sorry but I don't buy the argument of "let's make this patch that we know is problematic but at least fast to implement, and then we can discuss with more time the right solution". Because in the meantime the fast patch doesn't help solving the problem and in fact the chances that makes the situation worse and harder to solve are high.

- "If you are developing a service for developers, please discuss with the developers first" sounds like a sensible advice. It might sound like we are having a discussion here, but in fact all the developers with a name and a populat application that have taken part in the discussion have the same opinion. If they are not convinced, who will ITT convince? Convincing only those not concerned about maemo extras and maemo downloads will not help ITT users, that is for sure. Forcing the _senior_ developers to either follow a process they dislike or boycot an initiative of a forum they like won't help either.

So please, wait a bit, discuss a bit more, let's define the use cases and let's agree on the sensible ways to solve them.

One clarification:

- About syndication, do we know what are we talking about? Identified metadata that can be pulled from anywhere and reformatted in the way you wish i.e. perfectly integrated to ITT. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOAP for metadata to describe software projects. You know what is RSS/Atom about to report updates. I wonder what information about a piece of software or a release would you add here that couldn't come from the original sources at maemo.org. Then the user feedback proceeds as usual in ITT, nobody is questioning that.

And about people in charge of maemo.org not caring about users.

- It's because we care about users that we believe in quality awareness among amateur & professional developers and we agree on related processes that create "extra" work for developers (as opposed to just upload a file and ask for people to enjoy).

- It's because we care about users that we don't want them to fall by accident in a developer & techie space like *.maemo.org. ITT is a much better place for them and this is what I have said in this thread and many times before elsewhere. Syndication allows users to stay in ITT while getting software properly tagged as stable/beta/TNT and the right information from the place where the developers are.

- It's because we care about users that we want all the stable and interesting software hosted in the extras repository, and all the rest out of it. How the user gets that software it doesn't matter as much: app manager in the tablet, install file in ITT or maemo.org or the project website or a blog post or... If a user skips the repository thing i.e. installing directly .deb packages they won't be aware of updates. If a user installs an app in repo X nobody has reviewed (extras plans to have community review) the stability and performance of her tablet might be at risk. What is more, by installing one app that activates a 3rd party repo, the user will see the rest of apps in that repo in the application manager. All kinds of unstable/unreliable software can be there but they all look the same in the app manager. Risks increase of getting dependencies problems, more unstable software underneath, batteries drained, poor performance...

- It's because we care about users that we think it is better for them to know that there are NNN apps for their OS version, and be sure that this is much of it, seeing the same numbers wherever they go for picking their software. Having 192 here, 74 there, 17 over there, yet 1 more in my personal site and not all of the apps in all the places won't make their life easier. And again, who provides the quality criteria across these sites? Going through the extras-devel & extras path is the best way to have the most experienced guys watching at least the software that leads the ranks and calls itself 'stable'.

And finally

- Sure, whatever is missing in maemo.org could be covered here. You are welcome to implement in ITT whatever is missing for end users (everything since, as I say, it is our explicit intend not to cover them. But if there is something missing useful for developers... what is the problem helping improving maemo.org - the clear resource for maemo development? What is the interest of ITT competing with developer resources and developer audience, this is what is difficult to understand.

About NumptyPhysics levels:
http://numptyphysics.garage.maemo.org/levels/