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Posts: 146 | Thanked: 1,615 times | Joined on Dec 2016
#18
Originally Posted by jonwil View Post
1.Replacements for old Maemo Fremantle packages taken from Devuan or elsewhere that are modern, up-to-date and still maintained and which are ABI compatible with Maemo
Fremantle/support the hardware we have in the N(eo)900 (or can be modified to be ABI compatible and support the hardware we have without a lot of work). So, newer kernel, newer libraries, things like that.
Perhaps I am not understanding what you mean (and I agree with the rest mostly), but this seems inverted to me - why would you take new bits and nail them onto the old base? Why not switch to a new base (e.g. devuan or debian) that is maintained by hundreds and add on top the (older) parts that you need? Do you have time to maintain all the old and outdated packages? Do we have a special team that takes care of critical security issues? Who are on top of all the security bugs that occur on a nearly daily basis? What will happen in the next five years, as the old base starts to rot even more because there's no maintenance?

Essentially, most of the good things from the FOSS community (lots of hands, constantly improving software, lots of people taking care of most of the things for you) are taken away with this approach, leaving the few that want to work on and with maemo with all the work they really shouldn't be doing?

A simple example would be the root CA store -- if we used a modern base, we would just get that kind of updates for free and you would not have to worry about it. And there's a lot of examples like that: the wpa2 issue right now for example. Or the endless backporting of fixes to openssl that is not even being maintained by upstream anymore.

Adding to that, I am not sure how easy it will be to ever extend to other devices if we stick with an old base. Many newer devices need a way newer X, drm, dri, etc.

But maybe I just misunderstood you.
 

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