[maemo-developers] Public maemo repository

[From: quim.gil at nokia.com]

Ok, let me go once again back to this boat analogy. I wasn't in the
early days of this project so I really don't know the detals of the
first decisions, but I still see that the options chosen probably made a
lot of sense on that time.

>> Maybe because the whole concept 
>> of something that is heavier than water but still floats without 
>> effort seemed to be too good to be true.

Wood floats, agreed. But sorry, not without effort. 

Nokia has good engineers even if sometimes you disagree with their
decisions. I believe they knew about the Archimedes principle when
playing with wood. But you know what, good saylors of my Mediterranean
town know that this perfect theoric principle doesn't work in reality
(and Archimedes surely knew as well): floating wood ends up soaking and
sinking if you don't put a lot of effort maintaining it.

Combine this RealPhysics principle with the already commented fact that
a distro is a lot more than code (i.e. the humans around it) and you
find good reasons to start doing what our Nokia team ended up doing in
the early days.

>Nokia does not make it a secret that they choose for "strong 
>upstream projects" and the last moves (the ubuntu mobile 
>stuff) shows that  apparently something was created that will 
>be usable on different platforms.

Let's keep the transport analogies. You know that warning in the
aircrafts: "Help yourself before attempting to help others."

This is exactly our case.  We still have a lot to do in order to make
application and platform developers happy inside the maemo platform. We
are really happy seeing that Intel, Ubuntu and others are interested in
using parts of our work. We want to help them, but in order to do that
we need to make sure that maemo itself is in a good position to help
them.


>Could you elaborate a litte on the choice for debian as 
>opposed to openembedded or  the  openwrt kind of 
>distro's?(small fast ships that allow water-skying :P )  is 
>that the strong upstream projects thing?

Allignment and direct connection with upstream projects is probably the
strongest reason nowadays. We don't say the OpenEmbedded aproach is bad:
it's clear that is a good approach that works. But we can't support
officially all the alternatives and one choice had to be made. I think
we are currently in the right path even if we could make developers'
life much easier when compiling, packaging, debugging (but this is
another topic). If you disagree you can always try and support
alternatives like Mamona. 

>I do like the idea that the time I spend on maemo stuff might 
>be usable on different platforms.

I insist on this basic statement: we want people to install whatever
they want in the Nokia tablets and we want people to use maemo in the
way they want in non-Nokia devices. A core driver of this statement is
our will to help developers developing once and targetting to different
platform, getting the best result from their software and their time.

Quim