[maemo-developers] Backwards compatibility broken PR1.1 SDK

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Wednesday 20 January 2010 21:50:02 Jeremiah Foster wrote:
> I disagree. Debian has very high quality packages and software.

I don't think we are disagreeing.  I am saying Debian is geared to stability 
and quality.  I am just making the point that it achieves that by forcing 
things to take a long time to proceed through the QA process and severely 
restricting the number of packages that are accepted (I know Debian has 
**lots** of packages but nothing like the number of apps the iPhone has and 
new packages are not being added at anything like the rate any commercial 
AppStore accepts them -- those are the goals for us).

> Actually not true. Debian has had security for testing for about four and a
> half years.
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/09/msg00006.html

Security yes.  Support no.

> I think you are referring to unstable here. I run testing everywhere, even
> production web servers, and I have few problems. Especially compared to the
> Ubuntu machines I admin, or for that matter, fedora.

No, I meant testing.  I also use testing.  But people like you, me and the 
members of this mailing list are not the target audience for Maemo.  For 
example, kde is currently severely broken in testing -- it has been for many 
months and will continue to be for some time yet.

> I think debian should server as a model for maemo, after all, Nokia based
> its OS on debian. The biggest problem is Nokia's penchant for separating
> their releases from the community. There really should be greater
> cooperation between the community and Nokia, it is pretty much as simple as
> that.

For software and tools I agree.  But processes will be very different.  Maemo 
is not aiming for a release every 18 months, Debian is.  That fundamental 
difference stops the processes being at all similar.

By all means see what we can learn from Debian (and Ubuntu and Fedora and ...) 
but we have to acknowledge that different goals will require different 
processes.

Graham