[maemo-community] Was: (Re: Election announcement article (formatting & questions)) Is: Why MeeGo is not an option

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Aug 28, 2011, at 13:33, Attila Csipa wrote:

> On Wednesday 24 August 2011 15:46:55 you wrote:
>> The reason why moving to MeeGo is a red herring is because it is a whole
>> different architecture. 
> ...
>> In any case, all
>> decisions for MeeGo are based on software that runs on the Atom processor.
>> Maemo software does not run on the Atom processor.
> 
> Just one small factual correction, unrelated to the rest of the discussion:
> 
> Technically, Maemo *is* a two-architecture distro, ARM and X86. Admittedly, 
> the X86 target serves (almost) exclusively development purposes (i.e. 
> Scratchbox), but it still is a fully functional one.

I'd argue that what you're referring to is not what people know as Maemo. Maemo is the brand name of a type of tablet and associated software, not a development environment. At least that is what non-developers would likely identify as "Maemo."

If you're referring to the development environment as Maemo, you should really call it Debian and it runs on at least 8 architectures officially, 12 unofficially. 

What changes Debian into Maemo? The build system and a few binary blobs from Nokia? 

> This support is even 
> extended to maemo.org - all uploaded community packages are automatically 
> built for X86 (in fact, failing to build for X86 will prevent you from getting 
> published on maemo.org).

But no product has been made from this. 

I think the most important issue is to demonstrate that MeeGo and Maemo are really far apart, as far apart as Debian and Fedora, their parents. Although their parents are getting closer (SPDX, cross-distro-arm-porting, etc) there are still significant differences. One of those differences is governance and commercial backing. MeeGo still has commercial backing, Maemo doesn't.  This is an opportunity to bring Maemo on equal footing with the other, older Linux distros and emulate their governance model. 

Regards,

Jeremiah