[maemo-developers] Public maemo repository

[From: Rodrigo Vivi]

On 7/23/07, Marius Vollmer <marius.vollmer at nokia.com> wrote:
> "ext Kees Jongenburger" <kees.jongenburger at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > from what I understand it' maemo that has been assembled  from well
> > known wood sources (debian/linux/glib/gtk). I just can't imagine that
> > you could have been that creative/productive with hildon if you also
> > had to manage external deps/communication.
>
> Why not?  Hildon was one of the first things that went fully public
> after the 770 launch.  We had to deal with the consequences right
> away.  We might not have been perfect in doing that (enormous, sudden
> API breaks, no proper releases, etc).
>
> We didn't provide Hildon in the context of a continuously evolving
> distribution, but doing that would not have slowed us down, I think.
> We just would have had to learn some lessons earlier.
>
> > 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. so you are really going the distro/generic
> > aproach where the person who packages a package and the person who
> > created software are not the same.
>
> Yes, I don't insist that Nokia has to run the "maemo Distribution".
> Ubuntu Mobile could make the maemo distribution unnecessary.  In fact,
> my first reaction when I heard people start talking about a maemo
> distribution was: Isn't it a bit late now?  Can't we just wait for
> Ubuntu Mobile?

I don't believe that wait is a good approach. If we believe and
conclude that Ubuntu Mobile will be a good alternative we need to join
and help the Ubuntu community to do that. This kind of contribution
that makes the free software community even better. And if you just
wait for, I really don't believe that the Ubuntu Mobile for arm will
be released soon because they are focused on x86 platform and don't
have a cross compile environment yet.
But don't think that I'm telling "Let's do it.". I'm just telling that
somehow we need to move on and contribute with projects that we
believe in.

> > Anyway i wonder what part of maemo is to be attractive if the hildon
> > development goes "outdoors".
>
> The community will still cluster around maemo, of course: the planet,
> garage, etc, and maybe the distribution.
>
> > 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?
>
> I can't talk about the initial choice as it was already made when I
> joined Nokia (and it was in fact one of the points that convinced me
> that Nokia got it right before the 770 was launched).
>
> Later, when enabling real package management in IT OS 2006, I talked
> some with the people involved in OpenEmbedded, Emdebian and looked at
> ipkg, etc.  At that point, we already had the SDK based on Scratchbox
> and the Debian packaging tools were used internally and externally.
> Neither of the alternatives seemed to offer enough advantages to
> justify a switch.

OpenEmbedded doesn't imply ipkg. Mamona already has a repository with
.deb and sources (.dsc) generated using OpenEmbedded.
Another thing that is necessary to say is that OpenEmbedded and
scratchbox can coexist. OE is a great buildsystem to build the
distribution itself (avoiding monkey work) and scratchbox is a great
cross-compile environment that is very useful to make faster the
compilation in a SDK like maemo.

>
> The 770 and N800 hardware has no problem running dpkg and apt,
> Scratchbox is (on average :-) a nice cross-compiling substitute and if
> anything Operating Systems for mobile devices will converge with OS's
> for general purpose computers (that's why Nokia went with Linux, X11,
> Gnome, etc in the first place).  Thus, there is no point to go with
> some specialized, 'niche' approach to save 2 MiBs of flash[1].
>
> Projecting this into the future means that we should work to make a
> existing mainstream OS distribution useable as the base of the
> Internet Tablet OS.  That could be Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu.  Our
> vehicle to get there could be our own maemo distribution, or we could
> skip that step.
>
> [1] Yes, I admit to freely waste hardware resources to save human
>     resources and to stay in the mainstream.  Old time embedded
>     engineers might get gray hairs about that attitude, but then they
>     should go and program washing machines... ;-)
> _______________________________________________
> maemo-developers mailing list
> maemo-developers at maemo.org
> https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
>


-- 
Rodrigo Vivi
INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia
Blog: http://blog.vivi.eng.br
GPG: 0x905BE242 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net