Hi everybody,
I realize this may be somewhat of an inane question - and if it is, I apologize - but I'm wondering to what extent (if any) the packages in the diablo repo are generally "forward-compatible" with Fremantle. I just got the N900, and can hardly keep my hands off it for more than three seconds - but I would like to start loading it up with more advanced applications than those offered by the default Fremantle repositories. I didn't want to go completely nuts, however, before checking to make sure that some other lunatic out there has also enabled the diablo repository (preferably without bricking the device five seconds thereafter).

In particular, I'm rather interested in Easy Debian

No idea about Easy Debian, but for other packages, while they are binary compatible the specific libraries the Diablo apps link against may not be available any more, and the deps tend to not work without their names being tweaked (in which case you may as well just do a recompile anyway IMO).

It's totally hit-and-miss, with many factors: degree of program "Hildonization", versions of API and libraries required, dependencies (sometimes just their names).

For instance, the old Maemo4 game "Gweled" installs just fine with "dpkg -install debname". But Advoid, a very recent one which should be naturally compatible as it's written in Python, does not - just because the Maemo4 .deb depends on "python25-runtime" whereas Maemo5 provides "python-runtime"...