[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 08 March 2010 21:34:26 Aldon Hynes wrote:
>    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.

Nope.

The situation is completely different in a desktop distribution.  Ubuntu, 
Debian, etc. include massive numbers of packages -- pretty much anything you 
could need and certainly anything that two apps developed by different people 
are likely to both need.

Maemo has no such goals.  The base system includes only what is needed for the 
Nokia apps.  The community provided portion only includes things ported by 
someone who needs them for their own app.  In my experience as a Maemo 
developer, every time I want to create or port a new app I have had to port 
at least one library from Debian.  So, it is almost certain that anyone 
creating an app in an outside repos has to port at least one Debian app.  
Meaning it is not at all unlikely that two outside apps have both ported the 
same library.

I am not overstating.  Don't forget: we saw exactly that happening in the 770 
days and there were tiny numbers of developers back then compared with now!

>    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.

So, even on your desktop, one has one outside repos, another has 2 (I just 
checked mine: 3, although all 3 are currently disabled).  Even there external 
repositories are discouraged and kept to a minimum.  Yet you are proposing 
many times those numbers. 

>    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.

The point is that the only good resolution is to put all the affected apps and 
libs in one repos.  Otherwise, you will not be retesting to make sure that 
upgrades to libraries have not broken the other apps.

Sorry, it just is not feasible for us to have multiple repositories and keep 
sane.  The single repository is a very important feature in the success of 
the Maemo community.

Graham