Hi Andrei, > How does one take something as beautiful as " apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade" and > reduce it to such a total disaster?! We can't compare Nokia with the Debian project just because both use .deb packages. The software development process is different, the end users are different, the guarantees are different, the deadlines are different and etc. > crashes, bugs, and other problems with new version of the OS! One problem with the backups caused trouble to some users in the last release, yes. The dist-upgrade is not exempt of risks and trouble either. Since the times of Woody I have suffered some troublesome upgrades, both with Debian and Ubuntu. Haven't you? So it's not that simple, specially if you are Nokia and you have to provide perfect dist-upgrade's to your customers under guarantee. > Nokia followed a rather strange repo policy. We have to sort out our repositories in the maemo space (the packages for developers) but the rest (that is what concerns you) is more or less ok, although needs some improvement as well. You mention several repositories that don't belong to us. We don't respond of them. We can't and won't stop developers from creating their own repositories. We offer a single repository "extras" to the maemo community. Perhaps we can do better, so some of them prefer to come to extras instead of creating their own repos: http://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1558 > Why did Nokia not follow Ubuntu's policy of having a Main, Restricted, Universe and Multi- > universe Because the Internet Tablet OS and the maemo SDK are not formed by a full distribution. In fact it's not that different (don't take this as literal): Main: more or less the Internet Tablet OS released as image, no packages. Restricted (+ Canonical Commercial?): http://catalogue.tableteer.nokia.com/ Universe: http://repository.maemo.org/extras Multiverse: probably something in the extras repositories could fall here Then we have the maemo repositories, for developers, that need a better organization. We put them separate from tableteer or extras not to confuse end users. And there are multiple 3rd party repositories, which might be confusing. But well, Ubuntu users can also get lots of them i.e. http://www.debianadmin.com/ubuntu-edgy-eft-complete-sourceslist-reposito ry-list-file.html It depends on how far you want to go from what is stable and officially supported. Your choice. > the iPhone offers you 10 applications (or whatever, I made this number up), the N800 offers > 127 (or whatever number). Playing evil's advocate we could say that Symbian or Windows CE have a lot more without needing repositories. ;) Good tools for developers and a stable and attractive platform are heavier factors to get a wide collection of 3rd party applications. Imagine that we decide to put the 2 persons improving this instead of administrating a distro. But yes, got your point and we share your view on the benefits a distribution based on packages would bring. We probably have a more accurate idea of the effort and risks it takes, though. > the folks who designed the N800 either were not truly used to the GNU/Linux way of doing > things I must say that in our team there are several pharisees in the Debian & APT doctrines, not to go in details about other corners of the GNU/Linux spectrum. > or were overruled/micromanaged by a bunch of "suits". Sorry, no suits involved. > Last but not least, is there any hope at all to see an apt-get update && apt-get > dist-upgrade -capable N800 in the future? Yes: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail//maemo-developers/2007-July/010860.html Quim
