UPDATE: according to MeeGo developers MeeGo is going to be a new independent distribution
which uses the RPM format for packages but which is incompatible to Fedora or OpenSUSE,
i.e. there is no upstream distribution from which one could simply install addon software from.
see http://lists.meego.com/pipermail/mee...ry/000147.html

Maemo has been similar to outdated versions of Debian. Additionally, the /opt problem makes
it more difficult to port current Debian packages to Maemo.
The current discussion on MeeGo-dev is about whether MeeGo should be based on a popular upstream distribution
or whether all third-party software should be ported from scratch.
According to Quim Gil Harmattan ("Maemo6") will use apt/dpkg but be a fully MeeGo implementation.
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The decision to switch completely to a Fedora/RPM based distribution is IMHO a very bad idea,
especially for ARM based devices.

Debian/Ubuntu has officially supported ARM ports of the distribution for years,
while Fedora, on which MeeGo and Moblin are based, is still struggling http://arm.koji.fedoraproject.org/pa..._be_fixed.html
and not officially supporting it.
Moblin has nothing to lose from the merger, but Maemo will lose access to relatively
easy ARM ports of Debian software (cf. Jebba etch port) and the Debian standards Maemo users and developers are used to.

The package format themselves may not be very different, but the infrastructure
and the available software differs a lot, i.e. you cannot simply install a package from one distribution on another one.
Maemo, Debian and Ubuntu are LSB compliant and can install rpm packages using alien
but LSB does NOT require the whole distribution to be based on RPM or Fedora!

Another problem for N900 owners is that a seemless upgrade from Maemo5 to MeeGo is very unlikely.

What do you think?

MeeGo is not based on Fedora. It will be based on Moblin.

Any app that doesn't port easily was probably not following good coding practices to begin with.

Sure, all standards will be out the window now. Come on! Are you studying sensationalist journalism or something?

So?

Again, MeeGo is not based on Fedora or in RPM! RPM is the default package format. That is all. And that is neither a good nor a bad thing IMHO.

A troll is someone who is just offensive but not constructive. QED

That's a valid point he mentioned. There's no point of mentioning the term troll. Instead, by doing so, you're the one who will be considered as one.

As for me, I just hope this doesn't turn up to be a sell-out to Intel.

anyone who knows anything about actual development would know that it doesn't matter what file extension you put on the package that your binaries go into, once they are installed they run all the same. It's likely that Moblin wanted better ARM support and that's why they looked to Maemo where the work is already done.

That you ndon't have much idea about what you are talking about.
RPM is just a packaging system, as mature as dpkg is. It has nothing to do with Fedora, since it was just RedHat in 1996.
deb and rpm are just a tar.gz or cpio.lzma archives with some installation helper scripts when needed, and a formated text package description, plus a database of some sort to keep track of files and packages, plus the tools to manage all of this.
And, by the way, I prefer rpm to dpkg. Just because I use it since 1997, and find it more robust than dpkg (find my posts about the last seamless update to diablo)
Please, stop whinning about the packaging system. They could have used plain tgz like slackware and it would make no difference.

Switching to RPM also means switching to a different system as the base system. E.g. instead of Debian use Fedora. It is practically impossible to have a Debian system that only accepts RPMs.

Also: There is no good in replying so offensively. It seems that the first poster understands more than you do in this area and its points are most probably right. Instead of offending him try to understand him.

OK. Sorry for the label titan. I'll take that back. it is just that the points you brought up were already mentioned and addressed on the other thread and I know that you were aware of it. There was no need to start a new thread.

There has been so much negativity on this forum lately that I am getting a bit paranoid.

That other thread has already gotten quite huge.. I made it about half way before I decided I'd have to go back...

But I must agree that the switch to RPM is rather upsetting. I've never met an RPM-based distro that was as standards compliant and easy to manage as a debian based distro....

And this is coming from a guy that scored a 100/100 on the RHCE exam... so it's certainly not that I can't manage red hat.. I've just never like it.

Moblin is based on Fedora. They switched from Ubuntu last year.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS2068665492.html
correct, but is that a good reason to drop support for thousands of packages which have been fixed or adapted by the Debian community for the last few years?
the standards Maemo has been using so far and the community is used to will be gone.
Should we all learn and modify our software to follow the Fedora standards for no good reason?
packages from one distribibution cannot be simply installed on another distribution.
If you try do that you get same problems that Redhat users had in the early years,
when they installed RPMs from the wild.
Did I criticize the package format?
Maybe I should not feed the trolls...