On Jan 21, 2010, at 1:35 AM, Graham Cobb wrote: > On Wednesday 20 January 2010 21:50:02 Jeremiah Foster wrote: >> I disagree. Debian has very high quality packages and software. > > I don't think we are disagreeing. I am saying Debian is geared to stability > and quality. I am just making the point that it achieves that by forcing > things to take a long time to proceed through the QA process and severely > restricting the number of packages that are accepted (I know Debian has > **lots** of packages but nothing like the number of apps the iPhone has and > new packages are not being added at anything like the rate any commercial > AppStore accepts them -- those are the goals for us).
Not sure about that, debian has maybe 27,000 packages in the stable distro, plus several thousand more in testing. Plus they manage tens of thousands more in volatile, non-free, and unstable. Not to mention backports or Ubuntu, or Mepis, etc. So I think a fairly reasonable estimate is in the neighborhood of 100,000 packages for debian and debian-like systems. Note that these packages are of diverse programming languages (iPhone apps are mostly Objective C), and that the debian packages do different things. Apple has dozens of apps that do the same thing, pdf readers, noise makers, girls-in-bikinis apps, etc. Apple is no where near as diverse and large as they market themselves to be. Besides, lots of the "apps" on the iPhone are built-in on the N900; skype anyone? Comparing the two is really Apples and oranges, though I understand your point; Maemo has fewer commercial apps than the iPhone and Android. > >> Actually not true. Debian has had security for testing for about four and a >> half years. >> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/09/msg00006.html > > Security yes. Support no. What support is missing? Debian has always relied on the community to support the OS. > >> I think you are referring to unstable here. I run testing everywhere, even >> production web servers, and I have few problems. Especially compared to the >> Ubuntu machines I admin, or for that matter, fedora. > > No, I meant testing. I also use testing. But people like you, me and the > members of this mailing list are not the target audience for Maemo. For > example, kde is currently severely broken in testing -- it has been for many > months and will continue to be for some time yet. Okay, I concede this point. > >> I think debian should server as a model for maemo, after all, Nokia based >> its OS on debian. The biggest problem is Nokia's penchant for separating >> their releases from the community. There really should be greater >> cooperation between the community and Nokia, it is pretty much as simple as >> that. > > For software and tools I agree. But processes will be very different. Maemo > is not aiming for a release every 18 months, Debian is. The "official" release time period is 24 months. > That fundamental > difference stops the processes being at all similar. > > By all means see what we can learn from Debian (and Ubuntu and Fedora and > ...) > but we have to acknowledge that different goals will require different > processes. True enough, but greater co-operation should help facilitate whatever release goals we have. Jeremiah _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
