[maemo-users] Fwd: the hell of Maemo repos

[From: Mark]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Ryan Abel <rabelg5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Clearly transitions like these can cause some short-term instability
> that makes things harder for specific individuals, but the overall
> effect for the community, and the long-term effect for everybody is an
> environment with lots of high-quality, easy-to-install packages
> available from right when you take your new device out of the box and
> open up the Application Manager (Extras will hopefully come enabled by
> default with Maemo 5).[3]
>

Nobody's arguing that moving things to the maemo repositories is bad,
the issue is the process. However, you must not be using Application
Manager if you think "easy-to-install" is an accurate description. I
always have to make a minimum of three attempts to update the package
lists before it finally goes through. The descriptions are frequently
insufficient to figure out what a package is or does. The categories
are a nightmare. Adding repositories is not trivial, especially if
you're not familiar with Linux. You pretty much have to know exactly
what you want and its package name before you open App Manager.
Apt-get and dpkg are a heckuva lot more reliable, but they're hardly
user-friendly, especially to non-Linux and non-command-line people.

The one-click-install feature on the maemo site is nice, but it
sometimes fails because of dependencies and such.

...and basing an argument on what *may* happen in the future is not valid.

Mark