According to this page there are still a lot of personal repositories out there that hold packages for the maemo platform.

I feel that improving the quality control process in the official maemo repos along with other tools to make good software and packaging will mean that users will go to the official maemo.org repositories first to download their software. I also think asking people to take down their repos won't work, for various reasons.

However, others in our community feel differently, and while I won't speak for them, I will try to present their views. Firstly, they see the issue of personal repos as a problem for users since there is no way to do quality assurance on a private repo. If a user downloads something nasty their entire tablet experience is negatively affected.

This negative experience can be avoided if we ask developers to bring their apps "in house" as it were, bring their debs into the official repositories at maemo.org. If we don't do that the feeling is that things will only get worse, more repos will be created and more users will be affected.

I would like the views of the community - what do you think? Should we spend energy and time reducing these repos? Or should we focus on other things?

Thanks!