[maemo-developers] External Repository and HAM

[From: Tim Teulings]

Hello!

> 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.

These are possibly not the best examples for using shared resources. For 
me essential shared resources are libraries and base functionality like:
* libcairo, libpng, tiff, gif etc..
* qt, gtk, tcl
* pearl, phython, ruby

Scratchbox (on my debian system) does not bring own versions of such 
shared libraries so this is not a problem. And I assume that THOR 
neither does.

The problems come not with multiple repositories but with 
different/same/differently build versions of the same resources. This 
results in application A 1.0 from repository A also offering shared 
resource a to use shared resource a' (which is a variant of a) from 
repository B and which is subtle different and breaks A 1.0 (without 
author of A 1.0 even knowing, because he does not use repository B). Now 
trouble starts between the suppliers of both repositories to sort things 
out (but I need.., but it must not...). Things even get more funnier 
with 10 repositories ;-) In fact this must highly coordinated (and is 
IMHO one of the reason dtsributions exist).

>     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.

Hmm, possibly yes (but I doubt the end user would use the bug tracker as 
much as it must to sort things out), but it takes time to sort things 
out and to change and meanwhile the bad image of the device and it 
environment is already there.

We should sort things out in one repository, this is much easier and 
better than making customer first fall into the pit and later on getting 
him out of the pit again...

The simplest looking way is only simple until the next corner ;-)

-- 
Gruß...
        Tim