Originally Posted by zimon

So you claim having transaction support in a package manager is no improvement ? And also you claim it is no practically any safer having GPG signatures in packages embedded than detached somewhere in the repository and lost by many in transfer? If so, then either you are not honest or you do not really seem to know much anything about C.S.

LSB wouldn't had made a standard about package manager, if it wouldn't be important. And Nokia's case is a very good example how expensive it can become when Linux fragmentation hits like it has in this case.

Originally Posted by danramos

Don't worry about it, if it criticizes Nokia, it has a better chance of getting merged or deleted anyway.

Originally Posted by Funklord

A few pages back I explained thoroughly why transactions are a stupid idea, and that deb files also have embedded gpg signatures, the only difference is that it's optional even posted a link on how to do it. And either way, it's not like any of these features would be deal-breaker.

And you keep going on about the LSB which nobody cares about except apparently you.
The LSB was a bunch of suits who all used redhat, how are they relevant to anything?

Originally Posted by zimon

You are in denial-state obviously.

You say that transactions may not be good in mobile device because they take lots of resources? Really? What resources they take so much they cannot be used? You can google around studies done about transactions in databases, how important they are and why they are implemented.

I asked you to show where debsigs is actively routinely used. You didn't find anything because you didn't reply? Google finds lots of examples where deb-security policy clearly fails and where is wide open security hole.

Do you also think LinuxFoundation is not relevant to anything and noone cares about it? Don't you see, the thoughts and attitude like you have are exactly the reason why Linux is so fragmented?

Originally Posted by vi_

wut? Linux is'nt framented, are you on drugs? Linux is right here in one place.

Originally Posted by wmarone

And on mine, Extras was present in the list but disabled.

Under our new strategy, MeeGo becomes an opensource,
mobile platform project. Our
investment in MeeGo will emphasize longerterm
market exploration of nextgeneration
devices, platforms and user experiences. We plan to ship a MeeGobased
mobile product later
this year. If the market segment that we target with that mobile product does not materialize
as expected, or if we fail to develop nextgeneration
platforms, user experiences and mobile
products, we may incur operating losses and accordingly not realize a return on our
investment in this area.

Originally Posted by zimon

Roll back is not the only property which comes with transactions. Transactions makes package updates error tolerate. For example if battery goes dead middle of updating, or you drop your phone and battery flies off. When the system reboots, it can auto-correct the problem either finish the transaction or cancel it and tell the user that last action was not successful but it didn't broke anything at least. Or if some developer (maemo test and devel repos) forgets something and there is a dependency problem, after installation some other things are not working, user can rollback to the previous state and report the problem to the developer.

Originally Posted by zimon

Transactions is good to have in the package management, some people might think it is essential as the system state is pretty much like a critical database. Of course transactions feature can be disabled if there is good reasons, but I doubt in high end mobile phones there would be any. Anyway, rpm is in this way much better than deb, although in other technical ways they are pretty much identical.

Originally Posted by zimon

I mean that in rpm-based systems nowadays it is a common practice to have all rpm-packages GPG-signed. GPG-signatures are embedded in the packages and do not get lost even if you transfer and install packages through ftp-program, wget, usb-stick, bluetooth OBEX transfer and so on and then install the package without alive connection to the original repository.

You can google lots of bad examples where people install un-authenticated deb-packages with dpkg -i. MITM attack on non-authenticated data (stream) is trivial if you have the skills.

Originally Posted by zimon

The kludged way to embed GPG signatures in the deb-packages is not really used by anyone or anywhere. Show me where debsigs would be actively and routinely used, like embedded GPG signatures are used almost without exceptions for example in Fedora? Also it is important that developers have a standardized way to embed the GPG signature to the package release automatically.

Originally Posted by zimon

There are many good things in LSB. Without them Linux would be even more fragmented it already is. And as said, if Debian+Ubuntu would had changed to use rpm-system long ago, Nokia now wouldn't have the problem with its developers implementing rpm support to Ovi and Meego. A good case of fragmentation in Linux which clearly causes troubles.

Originally Posted by zimon

Debian and Ubuntu (and some other smaller players) haven't just taken the fragmentation problem in Linux seriously enough, and now see, it costs Nokia lots of money and eventually may mean that Meego won't succeed because it was too late compared to Android.