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Posts: 237 | Thanked: 274 times | Joined on Jul 2010
#87
if you don't want to read a long post, summary is

merging with debian is strongly suggested.
donations shoud be spent on maintaining infrastructure needed by the community rather than for hiring developers.

long version :

maemo was debian base from upstream + hildon stack + nokia closed source software (media player, camera, photo viewer, maps, etc) and closed source device specific software (bme, mce, etc)

when asking about maintaining the platform, what exactly are you expecting to maintain ? all base software versions move ahead upstream, and you are stuck with older versions lacking fixes and further functionality, also making life harder to port any other program from upstream, as they will depend on the newer ones.

expecting to maintain your own distribution fully is a lot of work, having active maintenance status of each library and program in the distribution, in addition to fixing bugs and making that software stable, you will have to keep them up to date by merging patches from upstream.

are you asking for donations expecting to pay developers to maintain the distribution ? well, no amount you can collect from here will do..

this work is tedious and a lot of distributions die before delivering a stable release, and a lot of those that do deliver fail to keep up to date and die too, that's why people looking forward to maintain a distribution base their work on another well-being distribution, a really good example is ubuntu being based on debian.

on each release they pull all sources from debian sid, start working on fixing bugs, adding some customization to some packages, in addition to adding some ubuntu specific software such as the software center, ubuntu one, and recently the unity interface, to name a few.

I suggest we do the same...
first, port back all patches that went into software that is currently in a better state here than that in the debian repositories,

well you don't need to count a lot, it's just hildon-stack that is in a miserable state in the debian repositories currently, so an effort like cordia is needed, but the changes are to be merged into debian upstream.

there is just one issue, in some cases the software patches get rejected, some work has to be done to make them acceptable, rather than whine about patches being rejected..

second,
maintain a website, forum, and repositories for you distribution, guess what ? this is already here! donations are better spent to maintain these, rather than expecting to pay developers to maintain your distribution.

maemo should be rebranded to some thing else, have a clear independent release cycle, meaning every 6 months or so, debian sid is pulled and bugs are fixed, customizations added, there is no need to collect money for this as a lot of distribution survive on community based bug fixes. if this proves troublesome, it can be made a rolling distribution based on debian-testing same way as lmde is right now..

the base release should be standard enough, having nothing that is device specific, and a virtual package added in the repository for each device that is to be supported, this package should should depend on device specific support software.

If things are done this way, each device can use all packages from Debian repositories in addition to programs uploaded to the maemo repositories,.

why choose debian ?

as debian is the distribution with the highest staying power..
18 years standing as a community effort and is expected to stay in the future..

the end result would be similar to hildon-desktop on MeeGo, but instead on debian, a well maintained distribution with alot of staying power...
 

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