Ruby on Maemo: RIP, kinda…
April 21, 2009 2:35 pm maemo(Ranting and mourning…)
I like that language. I like that open platform dearly (reserving some comments regarding Fremantle availability on n8x0). And some while ago I was happy to find that I could do some ruby hacking for maemo. Hurray. There were some incomplete implementations for n800, finally the version from rubyx.co.uk got ported to n810. And … the process stopped. Paused, I thought… The debs are still there, in their little repository. Sources (for ruby-hildon binding) … well, for some while you can live without them.
I wanted to put my little app into now-standard extras repo. Nokia offers documented workflow for doing that. But … there is no ruby in extras, so my debs simply could not be build. At that point I started looking for a contact with the lad who was cool enough to do ruby-hildon – in order to ask him for making a final step, publishing sources and putting the code to extras. Thanks to the colleagues, I quickly found that I have to talk to Tom Swindell AKA alterego (#maemo, freenode.net). He turned to be a sensible guy, he agreed with all my proposals. It was March 27, he was going to do things within a week. And … nothing happened so far. The only result I got is that he seems to be ignoring me now (that I discovered about a week after our initial chat)…
I could think it is about me being overly annoying and pushing (which sometimes I truly am). But I got hints from other people, telling me I am not the first one trapped in that scenario. Other people tried before, same sequence, same result.
So, I think all I can do is give up at this point (as other people did). If anyone (not ignored by alterego yet) would have time and interest to continue chasing that rainbow – I can only wish him all the luck in the world… Or, even better, if someone has time and skills (which I do not have so far) to redo ruby-hildon binding and build all the necessary packages – I would be soooo grateful.
Heh…