I think about the only thing Nokia could do to help with the mess repositories are in is to provide one and a central site and encourage people to use it.

If it were me, I'd call it www.maemo.org

... oh. Wait.

I think a lot of developers aren't using Extras because it lacks a lot of the features they can roll into their own repositories (download tracking, etc.), and doesn't offer the level of control that an independent repo will.

Oh, and it's about as stable as a house of cards.

That is a terrible response!!

OS2008 is out!!

The answer is OS2009

Um, what? OS2008 addresses pretty much all of the concerns he brought up. So, yes, OS2008 is the answer to all of his problems. :\

Would it be worthwhile to put up a poll about why developers don't use extras? If so, what should the options be?

I agree. While the idea of an application repository is a great idea and one of the strengths of Linux distros, there has to be a good deal of effort to maintain them and keep them consistent. There doesn't seem to be anyone driving this. Nokia has been generous is setting up the maemo nuts and bolts of the application storage infrastructure but the third-party application governance is absent.

Right now, there doesn't seem to be any policy for beta/testing/stable separation in the maemo repos. It is "nokia officially released software" and "other" ... that "other" consists of a huge variety of quality of code. I can see why some set up their own repos to keep their beta code and projects in development separate since there isn't any officially sanctioned public sandbox for them. But after a project version matures, there is no officially sanctioned way to get any QA seal of approval.

In the end though, this sort of thing doesn't fall under Nokia's responsiblity. Nokia can facilitate it but third party repos should be organized, conglomerated and tested by the third-party community.

Since there is one place where you can get almost all the repositories and install them automatically, I don't see what the big problem is.www.gronmeyer.com/it/ takes care of almost all dependency problems, doesn't it? Is there a practical reason not to install all known repositories from that site?

Some programs aren't working. If all repository problems are 100% fixed, they still won't work.

Seeing how big a PITA it is to even browse the garage site at times, perhaps developers put up their own repositories is because it is just easier.

No, minus extras-devel, of course (as it's full of incredibly buggy half-working software ), no there's not.