Thread: Need text editor
View Single Post
fpp's Avatar
fpp is offline fpp
2006-12-16 , 19:35
Posts: 2,853 | Thanked: 968 times | Joined on Nov 2005
#17
Originally Posted by Karel Jansens
Why is fragmentation a bad thing?
I mean, there are quite a lot of people who see the 770 not as a webpad, but as a portable Linux workstation; I'm reasonably certain quite a few of them would appreciate a more "generic" Linux, but don't want to dish out the dosh for a Pepper Pad 3. And I'm fairly convinced that a non-trivial subsection of those would be interested in a non-graphical distro for their 770.
Well, that was exactly the reasoning in the Zaurus community, at the time when the ZUG forums were ablaze with projects like Sash/Cacko, OpenZaurus, GPE/Familiar, pdaXrom, Debian, Gentoo, BSD, not to mention the more obscure (tkc, guylhem)...
They've been at it for, literally, years (I bought my Z in early 2003 when things were in full swing). And look at where they are now : nowhere. The 770 has gained more and better software in the past year, despite the ITOS2006 trauma, than I've ever seen for the Zaurus...
Don't forget that we already have fragmentation: There are several versions of the kernel available and there is the mutual incompatibility of ITOS2005 vs ITOS2006. One might say that in that last case Nokia started the fork themselves. Worse: Porting apps from 2005 to 2006 was so non-trivial that many of them are still not done.
I don't count custom kernels and OS upgrades as fragmentation. However, I was amongst the first to say, at the time, that changing the binary format was a Bad Idea (especially as no one ever bothered to tell us mortals why it was supposed to be a Good One). And it did take a long time to regain all that we had under ITOS2005 (plus some nice new ones), but I don't think there are that many still missing, are there ?