Hey guys,

I need a little help clearing up my confusion regarding Maemo repos.

Four repos come pre-installed in PR1.3, one of them is Extras. And we have to add Extras-testing and Extras-devel ourselves. Now the confusion is- the maemo.org catalog comes pre-installed and has fremantle-1.3 as its Distribution, while the additional two repos, I, as suggested by many posts, add fremantle as their Distribution.

How this lead to confusion is that I once looked up the repository.maemo.org and saw that the pool directory of all three catalogs had three fremantle distributions, fremantle, fremantle-1.2 and fremantle-1.3.

Because of this At one point, I had two catalogs of the Extras, one that comes pre-installed and has its Distribution set as fremantle-1.3, and second that I configured myself and had its Distribution set as fremantle.

Clearly, fremantle-1.3 is the latest PR and I have that installed on my device, and so that is the distribution I should use for all the three catalogs. So my question is, why then the wiki about repos says to add fremantle as the Distribution for Extras-testing and devel catalogs?

Please help me clear up my confusion by telling me the correct details to add about the three catalogs.
One more thing, does changing the Catalog name makes any difference or not, because every other post states a different Catalog name.

Thanks!

Long Live the N900! Long Live the Maemo!

Anyone? Please tell me what are the correct repos for Fremantle PR1.3.

for extras you can use fremantle or fremantle-1.3. AFAIK fremantle is an alias (link) to fremantle-1.3.

the same goes for testing and devel.

I happen to have fremantle-1.3 for extras and extras-testing and fremantle for devel, but AFAIK it doesn't make any difference.

I don't have a high-speed connection at the moment so I don't want to try changing it, but if you can, give it a try.

It's not a link:
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/pool/fremantle/
vs.
http://repository.maemo.org/extras/pool/fremantle-1.3/

Note the different timestamps! You wouldn't see that if it were a link.
I believe that fremantle-1.3 is a mirror of fremantle, because the timestamps on fremantle-1.3 tend to be slightly later.

I have similar question concerning the cssu-testing and cssu-thumb: If I have installed cssu-thumb, should I keep cssu-testing disabled?

My reasoning is that does the cssu-thumb contain all the same libraries,sw etc than cssu-testing, or only those that have been thumb-compiled? If the latter, then the cssu-testing repo should be enabled with cssu-thumb? If the former, then cssu-testing should not be enabled.

Without being an expert in CSSU: yes, you can see thumb as an "overlay" on top of testing.

Ok. To make sure I understood your response 100%, do you mean that I should have both cssu-thumb and cssu-testing enabled at the same time?

Yes, you should have them both enabled. I believe that is because cssu-thumb is based on cssu-testing. If that were not the case, they would not have come pre-enabled by default.

@reinob @sulu
Does that mean I can use any of the three dists.

You can use any of the extras, extras-testing and extras-devel releases.
You can even use any combination of the three but you should only do that if you know what you're doing.

It's the same concept like mixing different Debian releases. I guess even pinning should work, but I never tried.
However, be warned: There are no clean upgrade pathes between Maemo releases like in Debian. This is why you'll often read posts that say "never use dist-upgrade".
And sometimes even the dependencies within one release are broken.


Maemo is Debian's evil brother in terms of repositories. You're at the gates of dependency hell!

So to summarize:
Always think before you act!

If none of what I just wrote makes sense to you (because you're not moderately familiar with Debian), then stick to extras alone, never mix releases and if you need a package from extras-testing or extras-devel only activate this repo to install the package, pay very close attention what's going to happen to your system and deactivate it right away.