[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] The future of the Application installer

[From: Florian Boor]

Hi,

Marius Vollmer wrote:
> It don't regard the 770 as an embedded system.  Once you talk about
> installing arbitrary software on a system, it is no longer embedded,
> regardless of how limited its resources are.  It is also quite
> resourceful actually.  I think there is a lot to be said about using
> the 'real thing' when you can.  I think we can use dpkg+apt
> resourcewise, so we should.

Well with this arguments you won't need any package manager for "embedded"
systems at all. Independend from the definition of that word it is a fact that
the 770 is a device with limited storage resources and that's exactly what ipkg
was made for. It might be interesting to compare the memory footprint of
ipkg+data with apt+data.

> Yes, I know about it and at one time, I actually had a ipkg-based
> maemo repository (as a quick and dirty hack, nothing polished), so I
> know it works.  But I didn't actually see any big advantage...

As soon as we manage to update the maemo packages in OpenEmbedded you can have
this for free :-) Where "free" means "without additional hacks".

One of the things you can do with ipkg is to use it as a library and create a
useful frontend without the need to call external binaries. I must admit that
the way to do this needs some improvement (currently it is primitive and
therefore dead slow), but that shouldn't be too complicated.

Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
is the hope of today                    Tel: 0271-771091-14
and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: 0271-771091-19
[Robert Hutchings Goddard, 1904]        florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de

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