Pimlico on Maemo Chinook

Every since the Maemo Chinook beta was relased, people have been asking when we're going to make Pimlico packages available. I'll skip over the fact that Pimlico is open source, so building a package yourself is trivial (I suppose its a good thing that there are users who can't do that!).

Now, Pimlico consists of Contacts, Dates and Tasks. Contacts doesn't have a Maemo port as such and the device already has an addressbook of sorts, so I tend to leave that until last. That leaves Dates and Tasks, both of which require an all-new Evolution Data Server to be built, because Nokia strip down EDS for Maemo and don't install the calendar component to save disk space. This generally shouldn't be a problem as we've been building replacement EDS packages for some time now which adds the calendar component and restores some functionality to the common libraries. So, Rob set about re-syncing our packaging with the Chinook EDS (there are several Maemo-specfic patches we obviously need to include) and started a build. Then our plan started to fall apart.

To cut a long story short, the Chinook's Application Manager has an additional sanity check which wasn't in previous releases. The gist of it appears to be that a package foo from repository A cannot upgrade package foo from repository B. Or, libebook from maemo.org cannot be upgraded to libebook from o-hand.com. I can see how this can stop people accidently breaking their device by installing broken core packages, but it's also stopping us provide core packages with enhanced functionality.

Never fear, we have a plan. It's not incredibly pretty and will take a day or so of tiresome recompiles to get working, but we'll get there. That said, we've all been busy and now it is the Christmas holiday... so I wouldn't bet on being able to run Dates and Tasks on your N800/N810 before the new year.

As a reward for patience, however, there are Contacts 0.8 packages for Chinook in our repository.

NP: Last.fm Recommendation Radio

15:30 Friday, 21 Dec 2007 [#] [computers] (11 comments)

Posted by mike at Fri Dec 21 16:41:04 2007:
Couldn't you creat create a package "l1b3c4l" which conflicts, replaces and provides "libecal"?
Posted by Ross at Fri Dec 21 16:58:52 2007:
I don't think the application manager handles provides and conflicts as well as apt does.
Posted by Tommi Komulainen at Sat Dec 22 09:39:20 2007:
Hope there's a bug about this :-)

Dunno how libebook is really packaged, but I'd imagine building the EDS calendar support and sticking it in a repository (assuming flash space is concern) wouldn't be too hard. Technically that is.
Posted by Ross at Sat Dec 22 10:41:27 2007:
I've been pushing for the Maemo EDS builds to build a full EDS but only actually install on the device libebook, but that mean that libecal would need to be checked by Legal...  which took forever.
Posted by thp at Sun Jan 13 11:16:16 2008:
what's the status of Dates and Tasks for OS2008?
Posted by John at Wed Jan 16 11:27:14 2008:
"Never fear, we have a plan."

You've piqued my curiosity... I'd be very interested in a follow-up post once you get this plan in place. Especially since I'm looking forward to Tasks on my newly reflashed n800... :-)
Posted by Guillaume Desmottes at Mon Jan 28 17:16:34 2008:
Any progress on this? I'd really like to have Dates running on my N810. :)
Posted by Benjamin at Sat Feb 9 20:54:16 2008:
Speaking of it: Is there any chance Contacts will become available for gregale/770? Its missing from the repository, although all web-sources say it should be there and provide 1click-install-files...
Posted by Ross at Sun Feb 10 11:43:22 2008:
None of us have a 770 for testing the packages on.  The packaging is all in svn and if you have a 770 to test on, they are trivial to build.
Posted by Benjamin at Sun Feb 17 13:44:15 2008:
Ross, thanks for the reply! I'm the "user only" type of person, no experience at all, so I'd probably fail miserably if I tried (although...?). But its good to know why 770-version is missing. Having a OS2006 version listed at downloads.maemo.org I thought maybe it existed and was taken offline by accident.
Posted by Ross at Sun Feb 17 14:10:05 2008:
The packages are missing because there was a new release of Contacts, and we don't have a 770 to test on.  The packages which were available were very old.

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