Introducing http://www.opkg.org

[Tick Chen]

Hi Rod, 
  Your points are very true. 
Actually, we have a lot of discussion about these internally. 
When I am trying to create the community repository, we meet some issues. 
There were some open issues.
 1. Dependency:
    * Wrong/None Dependency
    The accuracy of dependency really matters.
    * Out of date:
    It is very hard to find out if the package is out of date or not. 
    * Different ABI:
    Some people may release packages with different toolchain, and this
may cause many difficult problem, and sometimes very hard to find out.
 2. Security issues:
    When we got a package, we will need to take a look of it's source
code, and make sure the package is not harmful.

For those very good projects, I'd love/encourage to put them into feeds of our
build system, and so that they will having less above problems.

We want to provide a platform that everyone can share whatever they 
want to share legally, and also what shared through Openmoko should be 
workable and runs well at least on Openmoko's Om2008.8.
Therefore, we have community repository to put these packages. 

I realize that, creating a BB file and building system with OE, sometimes is 
a high barrier from interaction with many developers. 
(Thanks mokoMakefile, it indeed helps a lot of people.)
Many developers actually do not care about how the whole system built, they
just want to develop what they are interested in. 
(And they should not have to worry about other issues) Therefore we provide
meta-toolchain. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Toolchain. 
For those projects, developers may just want to pack their own packages
and release. Other some may be data, themes... etc. If they are 
good enough and work well on current system, I'd love to put
them into community repository. 

I also encourage developers create their own bb files, and so that it can be 
build by our build system, and even be ported to many machine very easily.
That way they can promote their own brain-child greatly.

We also know there are many many ebullient hackers wants to release
their own distributions/repository.  
We love that. And we want to create an easy way for them to release and
promote their repositories. But for those repositories, we cannot
guarantee those are compatible for our distribution. Hackers will need to
take care of that themselves. 

To summarize:
If my info were not wrong or outdated. There *will* be three ways to release
packages/repositories through Openmoko. 
1. Through our build system, hackers provides (or ask us (but we are lazy)) bb files and
put them into OE. 
2. University repository: Putting packages that satisfy the following
conditions:
    a. Open source, and legal. (If they were execuable files, GPL License is prefered.)
    b. Runs well on our distribution(s). 
    c. Do no evil.
    If we found any package does not satisfy any above conditions, 
    we will remove that immediately. 
3. Multiverse repository: Putting packages of repositories. Let people
download those packages and adding repositories.
(Above is unfinished yet, I need to push someone to do this more.)

Praise on Tobias's work. It's really a very good way to find out useful
packages. This web site can be the best collection of useful packages (for Searching). 
It can also becomes one of the best community repository. If it
maintains well. We do very happy to see this, and appreciate. 

Cheers, 
Tick

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 05:43:14PM +1030, Rod Whitby wrote:
> Robin Paulson wrote:
> > 2008/10/12 Tobias Kündig <tobias.kuendig at gmail.com>:
> >> It's a simple database of available *.ipk-Packages.
> > 
> > great stuff, found some interesting things there already
> > 
> > would you be interested in turning it into a true repository? with an
> > entry for the .conf file for opkg?
> 
> It really is a sad commentary on the state of official Openmoko
> repositories that this question is even asked.
> 
> The state of affairs *should* be that you just get the application name
> from opkg.org, and then type "opkg install <name>" on whatever
> distribution you are running (or select the application name from the
> GUI installer application on the device) and it installs flawlessly from
> the official feeds for that distribution.
> 
> Have we all given up on that scenario (which is commonplace in other
> community projects) and must resort to even more third-party
> repositories which do nothing more than mirror bits and pieces of all
> the existing disparate repositories?
> 
> Please, let's make this the best site for *finding* new applications and
> deciding which ones to install, but hook it into the existing
> repositories and improve them instead of creating yet more repositories
> to confuse people, become out of date, and cause upgrade nightmares when
> they are not consistent with the base images ...
> 
> -- Rod
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Openmoko community mailing list
> community at lists.openmoko.org
> http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
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