I'd like to renew some thoughts I've already posted long time ago [1], with no replies though. In summary, why not using the Zero Install way (by Thomas Leonard, the man behind ROX Desktop) as the preferred package repository system for the Maemo platform? I can't see disadvantages, other than for the developers to take the (very little!) effort of packaging their apps as requested by Zero Install before uploading them into the Maemo Garage, or into some other "official" place reachable from the Tablet. Does it sounds unfeasible for some reason? Don't you think e.g. this method would behave very nice when reflashing? What about security? Would that method be less or more secure (or the same) than installing apps from repositories added to the Application Catalogue? Let me know, which are your thoughts about this? Please convince me that this is not the way to go (I'm a beginner Linux user, so probably there should be something I don't know which makes evident to others this suggestion is unfeasible or not convenient). [1] http://maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2006-November/006158.html -- Antonio > Also, on a mobile device, it's much more likely that the battery runs > out, or drops out (if user is a bit thoughtless). If this happens when > you're running dist-upgrade, you've bricked your device. > > On a mobile device it can easily happen that there's not enough free > space to do dist-upgrade. I haven't tested it, but I don't think > dpkg/apt handle dist-upgrade running out of space. Once again, > consumer would have bricked her device. > > Except maybe for the time taken to do backup & restore, re-flashing > the device is both faster and easier than dist-upgrade. The backup & > restore could be improved somewhat, especially in regards to application > installer though. Automatic restoring of packages after reflashing > could be risky though.
