The following information is from Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen who I’ve met at the MeeGo Conference in Dublin where he mentioned the outline of this project. It is certainly good to see it in writing and in the flesh.
Project Bretzn aims to aid in the process of Getting your applications from code to your users.
This is particularly interesting to authors of new applications, which have not already been picked up by the various Linux distributions. Since these applications would need to both create packages and market themselves, the many steps to get the software to potential users is long:
- Compile and package your software for all the platforms and operating systems you support
- Create a nice webpage with information about the application
- Create feedback tools like a forum and a bug report tool
- Promote your app on social networking sites
- Get it into a variety of appstores and on your website
- And finally, process the feedback from the user and re-iterate over the whole list of tasks.
The solution: Bretzn
Project Bretzn aims to reduce this cycle to 10 minutes of work with the following major goals:
- Make it easy for developers to release an application
- Make it easy for developers to market and for users to learn about that application
- Make it easy for users to install the application
To solve these problems, they have build services that would make it possible, with a few clicks, to publish software projects directly from the IDE. This has already been picked up by the MeeGo SDK team, who are considering including the Buildservice plugin shown in the video above in their next major release.
Project Bretzn, then, is not a single piece of software, but rather an attempt to fill in the holes which exist in what is already there. As it stands, the project has produced two core pieces of software:
A thin client in the shape of a Qt Creator plugin, accessed through the Tools menu in the IDE. The plugin lets you perform all the actions required to get data sent to the various build services and publishing sites, by contacting the server part, which then distributes the information to the appropriate places. The implementation of this also prompted amending the Attica librarywith new features. As some will already know, Attica is the full featured implementation of a OCS client library built by KDE which is now officially included in the MeeGo platform as well. The Qt Creator plugin is build around a simple library to make it easily portable to other IDE’s like KDevelop – consider this an invite!
A server library, designed to plug into the OCS reference server implementation as published by the Social Desktop project. This is the part of the system which draws the lines between the dots: It contacts any number of build services that you request your software to be built on and when you request it, it publishes the packages resulting of those build jobs on the distribution sites. The publishing system requires only of the remote sites that they implement the content module part of OCS, something that many already do.
Above all this software is Open Source: From source code of software above but also the web API created as the communications layer between those two components is free and open.
Source / Source
