[maemo-developers] How to use extras-testing correctly?

[From: Marius Vollmer]

ext Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com> writes:

>> x.The big fundamental difference between Debian and Maemo Extras is
>> that Debian is producing one big release of a complete integrated
>> distribution, while Maemo Extras is a collection of mostly
>> independent applications that are released independently.  Maemo
>> Extras is not collectively frozen at any point.  (It will cool down
>> as people lose interest in it, but nobody is waiting for a stable
>> release of Maemo Extras as a whole.)
>
> Well, I see them both as operating systems, so I don't think they are  
> really that different in keeping quality across the OS.

True, from the quality point of view, they have quite similar goals: all
the packages should work well together and form a consistent 'whole'.  

I was looking at releases: imagine that Nokia would develop platform
libraries in extras-devel as well, together with the applications, and
updates to the OS would be released by promoting them to extras (via
extras-testing), just like applications are released now.

With Debian's model, this would mean that applications in extras-devel
will be frozen and ultimately released together with the rest of the
platform.  I don't think this is acceptable.  Applications should move
to extras much more frequently than Nokia releases OS updates.

> The big difference between debian and Maemo is that debian is
> _completely_ free software while Maemo has closed bits.

Also, Debian is not developed behind closed doors.  But that's another
battle.