[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Aldon Hynes]

From: Graham Cobb
> I've read the post and it sounds great, except that that is not how
> repositories work, unfortunately.  What you want is multiple sources of
apps,
> with people being able to choose where they want to get their apps from
> (vendors, communities, hackers, ones with support, ones where you are
living
> on the bleeding edge, etc.).  Unfortunately neither DEB nor RPM can do
that
> for you.

> The biggest problem is shared resources.  To see the problem, assume that
> there is a library, libfoo, which provides a useful service, used by
several
> apps, but which can be built with different options (there are many
examples
> in real-life: security libraries support multiple encryption algorithms,
> sound libraries support multiple sound architectures, communications
> libraries support wired, wireless, etc).

Graham, (et al.)

   I appreciate your concern about shared resources, but it seems to me that
you are overstating the problem.  As an example, I quickly checked the
repository lines in sources.list on several different Ubuntu boxes I
support.

   One box included a third party repository for TOR.  Another included
third party repositories for Chromium and Scratchbox.  It seems as if there
is a long, well established tradition of supporting multiple repositories.

   Yes, it is possible that two different apps might rely on libraries with
the same name but different features, but if this is a significant problem,
then I would expect bug tracking systems to rapidly uncover and lead towards
a proper resolution of the problems, and community pressure would lead
towards the two different application repositories to resolve their issues
or see one of them fall out of favor.

Aldon