On Thursday 25 February 2010 06:05:11 Andy Green wrote:
On 02/25/10 00:14, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> I think they are missing the value of Fedora ARM completely, they
> are just using the prebuilt rootfs tarball to get started from what
> I can work out, it's a real shame they "wanna be Android"
>
> I don't think the "wanna be Android" is a fair statement. SuSE and
> Mandriva started as forks of RHL for various reasons. Android is a
> custom stack on top of a Linux kernel, Moblin is not. Its using free and
> open source components like most of the other distros. The UX is easily
> rebuilt and used on other platforms. I've done so for Fedora just like
> the Ubuntu, SuSE and Madriva guys have. You can't do that with Android.
What I meant by it is cut themselves off and roll their own stuff that
won't play with anything else. They could just not do all that
continuous work and be finished already today by really having a Fedora
basis with their packages and opt-out recook packages on top.
I guess the had an experience with having a Debian basis and decided it
wasn't workable to as they say "have an upstream". It sounds like an
expensive decision that reduces the value to anyone else of the work
they're doing.
You're right it'd be better to say "wanna be Mandriva" since at least
Meego also committed to an RPM basis, and you can't share Mandriva
binaries with Fedora ones readily either.
AFAICT, it seems that it will be based on Fedora style .specs, so it will be reasonably
straightforward to give/take .src.rpms from Fedora (and with a bit more work to
Mandriva/SUSE). They will likely also build their ARM binaries to specifically target
devices (e.g. ARM7 instead of the current ARM5 of F12 ARM).
So the comparison with Android is a bit off, since you can't really use anything from
Android in Fedora (or debian or...), at least for now, but there will likely be flow
to/from MeeGo to other mainstream distros.
A nice bonus is the fact that the Linux Foundation is at the center, so it's not all
controlled by Nokia or Intel. Both companies have been improving their FOSS practices in
the last few years. With luck in the not so distant future, a truly free/open phone will
be readily available.
-Jeff
http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba
http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba/Fedora