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I was just looking around here, and there's a ton of games posted in these forums. I was just wondering, how come most of them aren't in ANY repositories? I'm sure as most of you realize, its much more convenient to get them from a repository than have to browse through the forums.

Just speaking for myself: Given a limited amount of time, it is generally more interesting and fun for me to find new games and build/tweak them to get them running well, than to spend time dealing with installer and repository issues.

A second problem is that many of these games are just too large to be installed via application manager. A 30 MB game .deb will require >60MB free space on your root fs to install. There are workaround hacks for this, but making a robust one that would satisfy the 'casual user' who just wants to click and install is not trivial.

Tak, that makes sense, but I'm inclined to agree with Armin's outlook. (Though I haven't had time yet to set up the Maemo SDK, I've done other development, and hope to do some ports; I feel the same way.) I think a lot of the people who enjoy porting things are less likely to enjoy, or even put up with, the trouble of packaging, even with a standard sol'n to the technical issues.

Perhaps what we need is some packaging pros to team up with porters to get things packaged and reposited.

Well maybe someone can make some package template and others will just use it. Like «install on mmc1/mmc2» and so on. I think it won't take much time. For example Penguinbait's KDE port installs to SD cards right from the installer. Maybe you can use his template somehow =)

I'm waiting for one of you guys to post a good write up on packaging and setting up a repo. I dont really do irc and this info needs to be something which can be viewed by others, such as in the wiki.

When i tried to set up a repo it seemed like a very error prone method of software distribution. Mostly too much room for user errors editing freeform text files. Also i dont want it worrying about dependencies unless i -want it- to worry about dependecies.

And another quirk someone could address... whats the minimim effort required to have a large icon for menu (os2008) and small icon for app manager, how to name and where to put files. I'm dissapointed that linux or the tablet cant scale them itself.

I would actually prefer repos to be categorized by source so i can instantly filter by specific source rather than the federated anarchy which it is. So i guess im looking for synaptic features or something.

Also there should be a good way to generate (fiasco?) images so that i can back up and restore to the internal flash memory. If that were a possibility then i would feel less of a need/want to have raw debs on an mmc which i can install.

Unfortunately i havent been able to find a deb-repack to reverse engineer packages... that would be helpful for backing up 'proven working' installs/versions for subsequent offline reinstallation. Perhaps someone can compile this and perhaps make a gui frontend. The metadata to generate such packages is right there in the .list files in the overcrowded /var/lib/dpkg/info directory.

Dont take this wrong but yea i understand your lethargic wish to see everything in the app manager candy store, but cant the devs get a candy store for publishing them devs can be lethargic too! Or do devs have to be space shuttle engineers for nokias 'stage 5' attention deficit disorder users.

This is covered in all the booting from SD tutorials. Not exactly what you're looking for, but it's a decent start.

Oh, I agree that it needs done. But, since we're discussing voluntary work, with no possibility of being fired because of not doing things that need to be done... it's realistic to expect that things will be left uncomplete, with some things that do need to be done left undone.

Some developers, to be sure, will dislike it, and yet have the strength of character to do it; many will not. So the only way that all (rather, I should say even most) games will get packaged is by efforts of other people, packaging for the developers.

There are no obvious candidates for this; I don't think packaging is a lower-skill task than programming, like documentation. And I doubt there's anyone who would rather package than develop. So it's left to people with a sufficiently intense annoyance at everyone else's unpackaged games to pick them up and package them. (Who don't take the natural response to such annoyance: leaving!) Also, if Nokia wanted to include these games in the distro, they could hire people to sit around packaging other people's stuff (as e.g. Redhat does).

But I think we'll always be stuck with this problem to some degree.

More comments from people reluctant to upload on my RFC would be welcome.

So far official feedback has been slim, but there seems to be enough will on maemo-developers to make a start, at least.

Thanks, yes that is always a fallback position... would still be nice to extract filesystem from fiasco, apply a merge tree of patches/updates, and recompress into image which the desktop flash utilities can burn.

Yea, so theres that missing link of getting from -that- bucket to repo bucket that is missing? Also garage fails to upload files greater than, say... 5 megs for me.

As to your other comments, i can already generate packages (however simplistic they may be), but the repo doesnt like the packages (for lack of dependency info?). I should think that should be optional.

So theres a repo metadata seems interwoven/partially duplicated with package metadata, and add to that the layer of metadata for single click install. Im sure alot of that is due to deb architecture but the only documentation i saw for repos was a redirect to debian... overkill documentation wise.

Cant all these issues be addressed at once in a single simplified wiki article/example rather than having to piece together fragments of info which are possibly obsoleted and from different perspectives?

There was some noise about it today on #maemo. Bugging X-Fade about it may be productive.