MeeGo: the merger of Maemo and Moblin

Posted Feb 17, 2010 0:53 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

unfortunately it's more than just pointing a cross-compiler at your tree and letting it churn for a while. Debian has been doing the work, and a lot of testing. RedHat will now need to start doing this.

Well.. it kinda is for some developers. If your building a embedded system this has been very acceptable solution traditionally. It drives me batty, but for most devices you have a single application you need to support. Once you get that working on your OS then your goal is to never touch your OS again. It's done. So a one-time effort of compiling your own stuff and doing a bunch of hacks and work arounds is perfectly acceptable.

Of course that is not really something useful for a long term project that wants to support lots of different stuff. It'll take some effort and it won't happen overnight, but most of the work is already done by Debian.

Like I said before if you step back and look at the distros.. they are in their own little sandboxes, but they all use just about the same versions of software in the same ways with the same code base. There is relatively little variation. So most of the work that Debian has put into their ports will hugely benefit Fedora if they decide to go that direction.

also wonder how well it's going to work to base a phone distro (which may not be upgraded entirely for years) on a distro that only has a 12-month support window.

It probably does not matter a whole lot.

Right now you'll need the latest and greatest QT4 version to get what is needed commercially. Is that in Debian Stable now? Nope. When is the next Debian stable going to come out and get that support? Not even Debian knows. It could be in 8 months, it could be in 2 years. What if you need to back port newer features? Any code you touch means your on your own.

If Debian stuck to a time-based release then Nokia and other third party folks could coordinate and work with them. But the way it is now they can't. I know this is beating a dead horse, but that is just the reality of the situation.

So while Debian may offer long term support for Stable.. it is pretty much worthless for anybody that wants to make a real product based on Debian.

I've built small system images from both RedHat and Debian distros. It's _much_ easier to strip down the debian distro. The OLPC software fiasco had many causes, but I think that one of them was the problem of trying to balance between forking packages and living with the bloat.

Ditto. Debian is indeed much easier to work with on small systems.

Like I said before there are upsides and downsides. In the end it will probably be much easier to work with Fedora to sliming down their system and removing bloat then it is to get Debian to change their policies.

In this case I suspect that after a year or so all that 'based on Fedora' will mean is that it uses rpm packages, but the software itself will probably have very little in common with the then- current Fedora distro.

Yes. It would be unfortunate if the same thing that happenned to Maemo and Debian would happen to Fedora and Meego.

Of course Fedora folks already have a Moblin version of their OS out. So it is not like the Moblin and Fedora folks have had the same problems that the Maemo and Debian folks have had.

Posted Feb 17, 2010 5:38 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]