"ext Michael Wiktowy" <michael.wiktowy at gmail.com> writes: > This conversation has been had many times in the past and Nokia has > resisted it since it complicates updates in a huge way. It is a fact > that it is more difficult to do this on a resource constrained system > like the Internet Tablets than on a regular desktop. The difficulties are not with the resources on the device, but more in actually producing packages that are updateable without bricking the device. Even that is not very difficult, it just hasn't been tried in any serious way for a long time, which means that millions of small surprising details will likely pop up. Or maybe not. We needed to start doing it and to start learning the lessons. It's happening, maybe not as publically as one might wish, but it's happening. > However, I think people's perceptions that Nokia not offering this > functionality in the first place is an outrage against Nature are > born from their mistaken belief that the Internet Tablets are just a > small desktop machine and have the same constraints and should > behave the same way. They are under the hood. That's the point. They are not geared towards the same tasks and will behave differently on the surface, but below the surface, they are (could be) your regular GNU/Linux distribution without much problems. We need to strip down Gnome and the browser, etc, but not really the base OS. Without knowing the details, I would say for example that there is no point to remove Perl. Perl is part of a Unixy system now, and removing it means breaking backwards compatibility. Likewise we can easily afford Debian style package management. The one serious constraint we might run into is that there is not enough storage space to carry out an update of the whole OS. But even that should not be that serious happen since even on the tablets, the OS itself is almost always small compared to the available storage (100 to 150 MiB compared to a couple of GiBs). > Reality is that they are much closer to the resource constrains of a > cell phone [...] I don't know enough about cell phones, but I would expect cell phones to vary in their resources constraints enough to make this comparison useless.
