[maemo-developers] N770 OS2007 hacker edition made it to the title page of Linux Weekly News

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On 4/12/07, Laurent GUERBY <laurent at guerby.net> wrote:
>
>         Unable to install: some application packages required for the
>         installation are missing.
>
> Given that's just some misconfigured/misdocumented third party repo/deb,
> you can get those messages in any deb/apt based Linux current
> distribution so that's quite unfair to the "app manager" application.

It doesn't matter what the technical cause is, the repository
situation is a mess. Debian and Ubuntu don't have this problem by
better centralising, delegating and testing their packages through a
single build system.

I worry that the Extras Repo is both too hard to upload to *and* too
unregulated. For example, instead of porting a library like libsoup
once, it's ported by Canola, it's ported for GPE etc. The end-user
then suffers the problems caused by this lack of co-ordination.

Yes, the original LWN article suggests it's the Application Manager's
fault, but getting that corrected to point out the chaotic situation
of an ever-expanding set of (potentially incompatible) repositories is
a minor difference in an otherwise valid point.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/