O_o

Do they have MeDonalds here you live, or McDonalds?

Because if it's the latter, your statement is a huge stretch. If it's the former, then you should move.

Maybe the theme of the post wasn't as clear as i thought. Here's a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McWords

To look on the bright side, separating the smartphone industry into iStuff and meStuff would really simplify things for people who like to draw battle lines and fight protracted verbal wars.

Great video about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXK9XFolwTM

My biggest gripe branding-wise (apart from the name choice itself ) is that Maemo 6 and MeeGo are not interchangeable. MeeGo (from what we've been hinted) is a much broader thing, more of a family of interwoven platforms and technologies than a particular implemented set (like Maemo 6). I even find it hard to explain why Fremantle (having official Qt4.6 support) is not Meego in the same way Harmattan is.

So... as MeeGo is RPM based, yet Harmattan/Maemo6 Qt-based apps can be installed on Maemo5 surely this means one of two things:

1) Nokia expect developers to package their apps twice, once as an RPM for M6 and again as a DEB for M5
or
2) Harmattan/Maemo6 is a purely DEB based OS with very little to do with MeeGo and it's RPM packaging system

Option 1) is simply an unreasonable expectation from Nokia of developers - it would be better for Nokia to ship an RPM based M6/MeeGo for N900 than expect developers to do double the work, this is the quickest way to make developers drop N900/M5 support.

Option 2) makes sense as Harmattan should be pretty well advanced, and means Harmattan/Maemo6 has nothing technically to do with MeeGo, although might be branded as such for the initial release, with a later release switching to RPM.

Assuming Option 2 is on the money, Maemo6 is MeeGo in name only... in which case yes, Fremantle/Maemo5 could be called MeeGo too! But that would be even more confusing, and highlight the fact it's a branding exercise only at this point rather than any major technical improvement/change.

@ Milhouse

If I understood it correctly, Maemo 6/Harmattan is purely DEB based and has little to do with MeeGo's RPM packaging system, but quite a lot to do with the overall architecture.

attila77, Milhouse, you are serious guys and you will understand this quickly: Harmattan and MeeGo come with a whole Qt based application and UI framework and a Qt style API. Maemo 5 is a different story, with a GTK+ based applications and UI framework and GNOME style API.

This is what makes Harmattan quite close to MeeGo in platform terms, while Maemo 5 is really something different. That said you can reach very similar APIs with Maemo 5, and you can also add more libraries to Maemo 5 in order to fine tune the compatibility. You can also do so with Symbian, yet you don't have problems seeing that it's pointless to call Symbian MeeGo.

We can discuss this in more details once we have a MeeGo and a Harmattan list of components to compare.

PS: about the packaging... we are talking here about API compatibility.

I'm pretty sure that is the case...

... but I don't think that necessarily follows. Windows XP is a renamed version of Windows NT 5.1 underneath, but that doesn't mean older versions of Windows NT should be renamed Windows XP. It's just branding.

It seems to me that Nokia want to associate their next device with MeeGo, even if it's really running Maemo 6, in order to get on board the MeeGo bandwagon. I wonder if that means that the next device will be upgradeable to "proper" MeeGo later? If it isn't, then Nokia would have even more explaining to do to the masses - "yes, we called it MeeGo but I'm sorry you can't really run that MeeGo app you bought".

Of course, as Maemo and Moblin are both Linux based they'll already share the vast majority of their architecture already, so merging Maemo and Moblin to produce MeeGo is a case of choosing which bits to keep and which bits to drop (ok, huge simplification!) and then moving forwards with the new combined Linux distribution.

But fundamentally...

A "MeeGo" OS that is DEB based is Maemo.
A "MeeGo" OS that is RPM based is definitely not Maemo.

The next major release of Maemo (aka MeeGo) may well include some new features or functionality that derive from Moblin/MeeGo but ultimately it the next release has to be DEB based otherwise N900 owners will see much reduced app support as it's not reasonable to expect developers to support DEB and RPM packaging.

What happens once a version of MeeGo appears with RPM only support is then anyone's guess - presumably the next device (ie. first MeeGo device) will be upgradeable from Maemo6/DEB to a version of MeeGo with RPM support.

Obviously the N900/M5/DEB will eventually be out in the cold, unless the community can come up with a port of MeeGo/RPM which may be more likely due to the reduced level of closed components in MeeGo.

The best option all round would be to move as quickly from DEB to RPM and try to avoid a situation where both packaging systems need to be supported concurrently by developers.

Right, and it's great that there can and will be API compatability between M5 and M6 and MeeGo and even Symbian... but if M5 uses one package manager while MeeGo uses another (and Symbian a third) Nokia are expecting MeeGo developers to package their application three times for distribution.

This is an overhead they can do without, and I'm sure many will come to the conclusion that it's not worth the effort of supporting the M5/DEB system so support for the N900 will rapidly dwindle despite it remaining API compatible with the latest MeeGo devices.

I'm not that bothered about which package manager is used, I've got no allegiance to either, it's just that switching from DEB to RPM will have repercussions eventually unless the N900/M5 can somehow be updated with RPM support in which case this all becomes a moot point.