[maemo-developers] Broken state of repositories

[From: Marcin Juszkiewicz]

Hi

On my N900 I have all three Extras repositories enabled (normal, testing, 
devel) to check what is going on in Maemo5 world.

The problem is that some time ago there was (a bit crazy) idea about pushing 
everything from Diablo extras to be built for Fremantle. OK, some good apps 
arrived that way (hail Claws, die Modest) but there are some strange things 
too.

For example: we have Frozen Bubble (awesome game) but it is not installable:

Nokia-N900-42-11:~# apt-get install frozen-bubble
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  frozen-bubble: Depends: perl (>= 5.8.3-3) but it is not going to be 
installed
E: Broken packages
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# apt-get install frozen-bubble perl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  perl: Depends: perl-modules (>= 5.8.3-3osso11+0m5) but it is not installable
E: Broken packages
Nokia-N900-42-11:~# apt-get install frozen-bubble perl perl-modules
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package perl-modules is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  perl perl-base
E: Package perl-modules has no installation candidate

How it get into repository is unknown for me - it should not be there as it's 
dependencies should land first.

Other thing: *-dbg packages in extras-devel. OK, this is repo for developers 
rather then users but can't we move such packages into "debug" section where 
they should reside? Developers will fetch them by apt-get.

Another: usbcontrol - this is 770/n8x0 package not usable on n900 due to 
official lack of usb host functionality. Why it is in Fremantle?

Yet another: all those extras-devel packages which depends on "maemo-select-
menu-location" package which do not exists at all in Fremantle. We have nearly 
one hundred of them.

Many packages do not have description even - just name of one line of 
information.

Why we have that? Maemo always was mentioned as based on Debian but for me (as 
user of all versions of Maemo) it looks rather like it was maybe years ago. We 
do not even try to get close to it with quality of community packages.

How can we improve situation?

Regards, 
-- 
JID:      hrw at jabber.org
Website:  http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinjuszkiewicz