the idea of a package-system isn't bad. it way it is done here in maemo must simply get better. but many popular errors are simply caused by the graphical package manager, not by the repositorys (even when some of them are temporary down). there are popular systems as the debian/ubuntu repositorys which shows how uncomplicated it can be.

i find it curious too, that there are for example by far not all applications from maemo garage in the maemo.org repository.

believe me. it is good the way it is. no deb package should contain all-necessary components. thats the reason why you split components into different packages. so, you can manually choose which parts gets updated. perhaps it should now where possibly to find the needed things (but there are security reason against it). but in the end, packages MUST stay alone, or one day you will have similar situation as you have on windows.

you are right! the graphical frontend of the package-manager is simply crap.
it simply leaks with the following things.
- when just one respository is not availible the whole update process failes
- the mentioned thing with the lib you can't install in normal mode
- sometimes the package-manager just can't find all files in a repository. (server closed connection #bug) but console apt-get works flawless

greetz,
loki