maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Ask the Council! History thread

mr_jrt	2012-01-23 , 12:55
Posts: 249 \| Thanked: 277 times \| Joined on May 2010 @ Brighton, UK	#701

Originally Posted by sulu

Of course from a technical point of view the non-free blobs are not a blocker, but I'm one of those Debian users who don't use the system only for technical reasons. Therefore I'd appreciate it if a Maemo replacement on the N900 could run on free drivers only. But of course I'm aware that won't happen over night.
On the other hand having an extra kernel sounds pretty ugly to me because this way the project would never become part of the regular Debian distribution. I'd favor using the Debian mainline kernel plus something like a firmware-n900 package in non-free.
Frankly I have no interest in keeping Maemo alive just for its own sake. For me it has always been just a stopgap to run (Easy) Debian on this little "subnetbook" called N900 which just by chance happened to be able to replace my regular cellphone

I agree it's what we have to aim for, but I feel being pragmatic is the only way we'll get there. Having a system in the (current) state the pure-Debian solution is in makes it a curiosity for developer interest only...

Having an old kernel is a big problem, yes, but unavoidable if we're going to have to maintain binary compatibility. In my eyes, strictly speaking I'm not too bothered about being part of the "mainline" Debian repos, and indeed I might wonder if that was too big a constraint. What I'd be more than happy with is a relationship akin to Ubuntu's, where we share source packages, have some packages of our own, push and pull source from Debian, and have bugs linked to those in their BTS. A tight integration of separate projects, if you will, sharing Debian's policies of pushing changes upstream (to Debian) as much as possible.

Mobile devices if nothing else will always have different sensible defaults than desktop packages!