[maemo-community] [GSoC 09] - Integrating Maemo in Open Embedded

[From: Kees Jongenburger]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 1:21 PM, Kirtika Ruchandani <kirtibr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Also worth noting that we have some Zaurus people around and I/we did look
>> at OE
>> for Mer but felt that we wanted more compatibility with maemo etc to allow
>> access to things like "Extras".
>
> @David:
> Its probably  *very* premature for me to be speaking at this point about
> this - but I fail to understand why stuff like "Extras" should be a problem
> with OE. IMHO, OE is designed to accomodate bringing new packages easily -
> making it just a matter writing a small bb recipe - if the distro confs are
> well-written.  But as I said, I probably don't get your point because I
> haven't reached that  stage in my work as yet.

Debian's packaging strategy if different from OE's in the sense that
the packaging system is intrusive. Therefore
a "good" debian packages contains a source .deb package and the
package can be created using debian tools.

Many packages created for Maemo are some mix of "proper" debian
packages , packages without corresponding sources
and packages that with corresponding sources that can not be
recompiled easily because the source package
was only created as part of the debianisation. If the OE port is to
support the "extras" packages it needs to support
the binary packages "as-is(binary)". To be able to do that the OE
build would need to have the same base package names as the Maemo
packages(not such a big problem) but binary compatibility clearly
would not fit in the OE strategy where the packages
can be created for different architectures or optimized for different
processors.

In short it most certainly is hard to achieve this. The "easy" thing
is to find the sources and create a bb file for it and that is extra
work. So it is hard to make use of all the great packages created to
maemo-proper. Mer is very close to achieving that goal

Greetings




>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Kirtika Ruchandani
> Sophomore
> Computer Science and Engineering
> Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
>
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