[maemo-developers] MeeGo

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Jean-Christian de Rivaz wrote:

> Yves-Alexis Perez a écrit :
> 
> Absolutely right. The success of Ubuntu and Debian have proved this.
> 
> Aside of this, I am puzzled to see a project that it targeted to
> support both X86 and ARM processors without even considering the
> multiarch future. Sound crasy to me. Debian have accumulated a
> immense amount of knowledge on how to do this the right way and
> there have made many changes in the package management to handle
> multiarch. RPM packaging is completely outdated about this.

What is at issue is developers. 

Intel and Maemo want to merge their projects to gain an economy of scale. Both Intel and Nokia know that they have to have a neutral third party to manage the project, otherwise devs will feel it is 'owned' by Nokia or Intel. So they turned to the Linux Foundation to host repos and such. The Linux Foundation is also deeply involved in the Linux Standards Base which decided that to be compliant with the LSB you have to support RPM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base#Choice_of_RPM_package_format

The APT system as a whole is better than RPM. One might argue that this has been proven by the runaway success of Ubuntu and other deb based distros, like Linux Mint. The wide adoption would certainly indicate that it is more user friendly especially since debian has never marketed its system nor locked in users, as Red Hat has. (Remember Red Hat's move to paid support?)

Intel and Nokia do not care about the implementation of the package system, they just want revenue from app stores. The upshot from all of this is that we are stuck with RPM, there is no going back, and technical merits or even perceived technical merits do not matter. Fortunately RPM is not that hideous, at least for most use cases, and there are lots of tools like alien to convert from RPM to APT.

If you as a developer are unwilling to work for these large companies, you may want to seriously consider Mer - a Maemo-based distribution designed to run on embedded devices which is much more open than MeeGo and uses APT.

Jeremiah
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